Your ISP is lying! Monitor your Internet with a Pi

internet service providers bastions of honesty and transparency right yeah no i can't even say that with a straight face here in st louis i have two options for my internet i can get gigabit cable internet from spectrum or 75 megabit dsl from at t that's it and you're probably like oh gigabit that's fast why would you complain well first of all gigabit just means 930 megabits down but only 40 megabits up and that's the highest plan that costs about 150 bucks a month but yeah first world problems here but much of the world is way better and is a gigabit really a gigabit you probably don't know if you're getting the internet experience you're paying for well i do and it's not hard to do it all you need is a 35 raspberry pi and you don't even need a pie you could run the stuff i'm going to show you on any computer i just like having a dedicated computer to run all my internet connection tools so it's easy to backup or replace and it doesn't ever get bogged down i call this my internet pie and i have it in this fancy network rack but it could just as easily be on my desk or hanging up in a closet somewhere near my internet router the most important thing for measuring a network connection is that it's wired wi-fi especially on the pi fluctuates quite a bit and is terrible for monitoring anything besides maybe wi-fi signal strength the internet pi is running a few services most notably pi hole for dns privacy and ad blocking and grafana dashboards that show me my internet connection in real time and the cool thing about this project being open source is you can modify it to suit your needs exactly for example if you have an isp like spacex's starlink you can also monitor every detail of starling's connection over time using the same dashboard or if you want to monitor something like the power consumption of an appliance in your home using a shelley plug like the one i have my starlink router plugged into there's a dashboard for that too and having a pie monitoring my internet continuously makes it easy to see trends over time or confirm outages if you just spot check by running a speed test every now and then you don't have much data to go on i set up this raspberry pi using my free and open source internet pi project on github there's a link to it below and it's really easy to set it up especially if you just need pi hole or internet monitoring and don't want to install any of my other dashboards i set up my internet pi from another computer but you could also run the internet pipe playbook on the pi itself following the install instructions you need to have a pi setup with raspberry pi os running on your network and be able to ssh into the pi you download the internet pi repository to your computer make sure you have ansible installed and install the ansible galaxy content that's required to make the playbook work then you copy the example inventory and configuration files and modify them for your own needs and run the playbook the playbook will automatically install all the tools you choose in your configuration file and once that's done you should be able to access your pi's ip address in a web browser to see pihole or visit the ip address with this extra bit on the end to see the grafana dashboards if you want to use pihole as your home network's dns server the best way is to configure your router to advertise the pi's ip address as the primary dns server for your whole home network for extra redundancy you could actually configure two pi's running pi hole but i'm not currently doing that and getting two pi synced up is a little out of scope for this video but the great thing is now you can see all the dns requests your devices are making and make sure things like so-called smart tvs don't send tons of information to advertisers pyhol is a great first line of defense for your internet privacy at least at home and it even has some other neat tools built in like a simple dns server if you want to use them the internet monitoring dashboard is automatically configured for you but it can take up to an hour before you start seeing data in my case it's been running for a couple months so i can see the internet connection for the past day week or even longer the way this works is there's a docker container running in the background that connects to speedtest.net every 30 minutes or so another docker container running prometheus asks the first container to run a speed test it stores the data on the pi and then the dashboard displays it over time there's another service that does simple checks on websites you can configure in my case i check a connection to github google and my personal website and those checks are performed every few seconds to give a very fine detailed view when there's more latency in your internet connection one thing i found interesting was that my cable internet connection which is supposed to be one gigabit is only really about 700 megabits on average cable internet speeds can vary dramatically depending on what other people in my neighborhood are doing and how my isp has it set up fortunately my upload speeds are pretty consistent and since that's what i care about the most i'm willing to pay the high price for my plan but i'd be a lot happier with 50 or 100 megabits of asymmetric data since i'm not really downloading terabytes of files every day there's also a latency gauge showing the average latency over the selected time period and my latency is pretty good but not amazing at about 16 milliseconds now the main reason i set all this stuff up was to compare my gigabit cable internet to spacex's starlink internet and you can see starlink's connection is a bit less stable but that's not really starlink's fault i have trees all around my house so there's no way to get a clear sky to make starlink work all the time anyways the main thing i wanted to see was the averages when starlink is connected it looks like on average i'm getting over 150 megabits down and 15 megabits up with about 40 milliseconds of latency now those numbers are less than my cable isp sure but starlink also costs less per month it's only a hundred bucks and starlink is also beaming the internet through satellites up in the sky for someone who doesn't have a fast cable option and is living with dial up internet speed like somebody on a farm that's not bad at all but i mentioned earlier there's also a starlink specific dashboard that gives all the details you'd normally find in the starlink app i haven't been actively using the starlink connection today so it's a little barren but it gives a ton of detail and i'd like to thank danopstech for making this dashboard possible it uses his docker image and his dashboard code and he even made it work on the raspberry pi after i asked about doing it prometheus and grafana are the tools that i use to make these dashboards and they can do a ton of other things too i bought a shelley plug which is a smart wi-fi power plug that can report power usage i noticed it didn't have an easy way to get its data into prometheus so i made a little data exporter and now i have this dashboard showing me how much power starlink's router and dish use all the time and that's a lot but i'll cover starlink more in a review video soon so subscribe so you don't miss it you can read more about how i set up the shelley plug for power monitoring on my blog there's a link for it in the description this video was meant to show you how i'm making my internet experience better with a raspberry pi and now i know exactly how much my isp is fleecing me for internet in spectrum's case it looks like they're only giving me about three-fourths of what i pay for i wish i could just pay them 110 a month instead of 150 but if i did that they'd cancel my service and i couldn't upload these youtube videos anymore i'd like to thank max anderson for the original monitoring configuration the developers behind pihul for making it free in open source and especially miguel who maintains the speed test exporter for his help getting some bugs fixed let me know in the comments what other neat things you might want to monitor with a pie and until next time i'm jeff gearling let's actually get started here okie dokie oh cut out that more latency in your inner ah let's redo that one that was just i was not into it um

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 212,550

Keywords: raspberry pi, isp, internet, internet service provider, att, spectrum, charter, verizon, centurylink, rack, monitoring, grafana, prometheus, dashboard, speedtest, exporter, shelly plug, power, starlink, spacex, dishy, router, ethernet, service, comcast, cox, frontier, mediacom, tds, windstream, earthlink, fiber, satellite, dial up, dsl, fast, speed, slow, bandwidth, pi-hole, pi hole, network, networking

Id: rIUc4C4TXog

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021