Information on EdgeRouter and UNMS

[Akshay]

Hi,

I am looking into purchasing ER-4 and using UNMS to gather statistics on bandwidth usage by IP/device. I believe this feature does not work stock in the ER-4 which is why I am looking at UNMS.

My current network is basically an Eero Pro as a router and 2 additional Eero Pro's to provide more coverage across the house. All of these are wired. There are also multiple unmanaged Netgear switches through the network.

Despite having lots of devices, my setup is fairly standard. I don't plan on using VLAN's or running any VPN on the ER-4. I am 99% sure that I will be using only the 192.168.1.x subnet for the entire house as well. The Eero Pro's basically just runs in bridge mode and provide wireless.

Some questions I have:

- Will the fact that I do NOT use Ubuquiti switches and AP's prohibit the UNMS from giving me accurate information on devices and their bandwidth usage?
- I plan on using a ESXi VM for running UNMS. What kind of specs am I looking at for this?
- Would the overhead of the ER-4 sending data to UNMS cause any significant overhead and impact performance?

Thanks!

Edit: Also wanted to add that my current home connection is 250/10 Mbps

 

[roadwrenchtech]

Edgeos supports bandwidth monitoring in the admin console. You don't need unms for that. Having mixed brands of equipment behind the router will not affect this ability.

 

[Akshay]

Edgeos supports bandwidth monitoring in the admin console. You don't need unms for that. Having mixed brands of equipment behind the router will not affect this ability.

I was trying to research this and saw mixed information and very little feedback on the official Ubuquiti forums. I read that ER-4 would require hardware offloading enabled to capture such data and also that it would impact performance if it was enabled for this purpose. Also, I would need to run/configure ntopd, bandwidthd OR darkstats on ER4 which would again impact performance.

I am looking to capture bandwidth usage per device/IP and also be able to maintain the history for the same over the period of a few months atleast. I also read that the ER4 loses such data upon reboot. The UNMS interface looks easy enough to use and I even installed it on an ESX VM to take a look. However, I also read somewhere that UNMS will NOT capture data for devices that are not directly connected to a Ubuquiti device. I also read similar information with regards to using the Unifi Controller for data if I used just the Unifi Router and NOT their other switches/AP's.

 

[roadwrenchtech]

I'm running a erx, the smallest of the edgemax routers. I have not enabled hardware offloading. I just went in and turned on traffic analysis and it does in fact measure current bandwidth and cumulative bandwidth per each client on the network. I do not usually run this feature, but it must track some of this anyway, as my tv shows over 2 gigabytes used. The erx cpu usage only increased by 5% or so turning this on, and ram usage went up by 2%. The erx still responds across network with 1ms pings.

 

[Akshay]

I'm running a erx, the smallest of the edgemax routers. I have not enabled hardware offloading. I just went in and turned on traffic analysis and it does in fact measure current bandwidth and cumulative bandwidth per each client on the network. I do not usually run this feature, but it must track some of this anyway, as my tv shows over 2 gigabytes used. The erx cpu usage only increased by 5% or so turning this on, and ram usage went up by 2%. The erx still responds across network with 1ms pings.

Just trying to get more information out here so please bear with me.

- Do you have non-Ubitiqui AP's or switches behind your ER-X? Did you see usage data usage for devices that were connected to those AP's or switches?
- Was the data usage information persistent? Or did it get lost upon a reboot?

Thanks and sorry to be a bother.

 

[roadwrenchtech]

Just trying to get more information out here so please bear with me.

- Do you have non-Ubitiqui AP's or switches behind your ER-X? Did you see usage data usage for devices that were connected to those AP's or switches?
- Was the data usage information persistent? Or did it get lost upon a reboot?

Thanks and sorry to be a bother.

It's no bother. I have tp-link access points and switches. I don't normally use this feature so I can't say if it the history would persist through a reboot. That said there is really no reason to reboot an edgerouter unless your upgrading firmware or have a power outage with no ups. They seem to run just fine for months and months without reboots.

 

[Akshay]

It's no bother. I have tp-link access points and switches. I don't normally use this feature so I can't say if it the history would persist through a reboot. That said there is really no reason to reboot an edgerouter unless your upgrading firmware or have a power outage with no ups. They seem to run just fine for months and months without reboots.

Thanks for the answers.

I am guessing the one advantage UNMS may offer is the persistent storage of such information. Maybe?

 

[roadwrenchtech]

Thanks for the answers.

I am guessing the one advantage UNMS may offer is the persistent storage of such information. Maybe?

It may do that as well, unsure as I dont have enough compatible products deployed that managing them centrally is necessary it has been my impression that unms is designed for managing multiple ubiquiti products at a time as it's main feature.

 

[ddaenen1]

It may do that as well, unsure as I dont have enough compatible products deployed that managing them centrally is necessary it has been my impression that unms is designed for managing multiple ubiquiti products at a time as it's main feature.

I have anERL3 and Netgear switch and several AP's and other devices connected to the switch. I am running UNMS on a Windows 10 server with Ubuntu 18.04LTS on Oracle VB as i merely wanted to know what UNMS was about with no immediate need to manage my network as the stats i get from the ERL3 are more than sufficient for my use. I must say that UNMS comes in handy when you want to map out your network (it has a nice topology feature) and when you want to monitor performance over a long time range and last but not least, you can configure and change settings of the ER without login into the router itself. Probably it has any more features but i haven't spend too much time on it so far.

 

[speedingcheetah]

I have an ER-4 and UNMS setup and connected to it.
It does not show DPI usage stats in UMNS dashbaord anywhere I can find.
Only on the routers built in GUI interface do I find that info.

 

[tannebil]

I just switched to an ER-X with UNMS and it's the same as the ER-4. I saw a bit of chatter in the forums about UNMS perhaps being a data repository in the future but today it's all about system management outside performance like outages and firmware upgrades. I put up UNMS just to try it out but don't really see much reason to run it unless you have more than a few pieces of EdgeMax kit.

The stats collected by the router are decent but are more about current traffic and cumulative totals (by device/application) since the last time the stats were reset 0r the router rebooted. You can create new application categories by creating groups in the firewall section, e.g. I created a Backblaze application by defining firewall group that included all the Backblaze server addresses.

I took a look at the Unifi Controller user guide and the statistics were more comprehensive but I didn't see anything that was fundamentally different as far as data collection goes, e.g. no time series buckets at the device/application level so don't know if running a USG with Unifi would actually be better as far as statistics go.

One thing that did come up for me is that the ER-X web interface is crippled running on iOS. I tried both Safari and Chrome. The Dashboard is missing most data and Traffic Analysis has no data. UNMS throws "unsupported browser" messages but everything looks OK at first glance.

ER-X+UNMS is an unbelievable bargain for $60.

 

[speedingcheetah]

ER-X+UNMS is an unbelievable bargain for $60.

As long as you do NOT flash the v2 branch firmware for the X....it is BAD. Causes many issues even bricks.

 

[tannebil]

Must have dodged a bullet as I upgraded to v2.0.1 without any issues (so far).

It looks like there are statistics in UNMS using Netflow but it's taking time to get it puzzled out. I got Netflow running on the ER-X and connected to my UNMS server but I'm struggling with figuring out how to actually display them. I see statistics for all my devices in Reports under "Unknown IPs" but as soon add the device (a Mac Mini for example) using that screen, the device disappears. I can now see the device in the Devices screen but when I click on it, it only brings up the configuration data. It's not clear if that's because it now wants to pull the statistics from the device using SNMP (which I'm not running on the device) instead of using the ER-X statistics or if it's because I'm just not looking in the right place.

 

[speedingcheetah]

Must have dodged a bullet as I upgraded to v2.0.1 without any issues (so far).

It looks like there are statistics in UNMS using Netflow but it's taking time to get it puzzled out. I got Netflow running on the ER-X and connected to my UNMS server but I'm struggling with figuring out how to actually display them. I see statistics for all my devices in Reports under "Unknown IPs" but as soon add the device (a Mac Mini for example) using that screen, the device disappears. I can now see the device in the Devices screen but when I click on it, it only brings up the configuration data. It's not clear if that's because it now wants to pull the statistics from the device using SNMP (which I'm not running on the device) instead of using the ER-X statistics or if it's because I'm just not looking in the right place.

Things are very broken on V2 firmware....Netflow may be one of the things.
I do know if you enable HW Offloading, the router will most certainly brick it self or get stuck in a boot loop. (Having netflow enabled, however, automatically disable hwofload.)
You would probably get better and more useful info that would help you on the actual Ubquiti Forums.
SNB is pretty much mainly ASUS and Netgear focused users....from what I see.
Fare more experts in Ubquiti hardware as well as actual Admins and Employees over there that may help you, you will need to export and post your router config though.

 

[tannebil]

I'm lurking in the Ubiquiti forums but most of the discussion is about commercial networking topics. I'm kind of hesitant to just jump in with hobbyist newbie questions about home networks.

As far as I can tell, Netflow is working but it's just not an emphasis area in UNMS at this point. I can assign a device to a client and see last hour/day/month upload/download buckets but all devices assigned to a client are aggregated so no device-level detail. I also can see upload/download counters for all devices but there is no duration attached to the buckets. The intended audience for UNMS appears to be people that are managing large distributed networks either internally or as a service provider so it's not too surprising it doesn't really address my needs.

If I installed one of the many Netflow analysis packages, I should be able to slice and dice at will but, at least for the moment, it's doing what I need so I can't really complain. Traffic Analysis in the ER-X helped me identify the vampire sucking up my Xfinity data allocation (Backblaze dutifully backing up files for macOS Photos which was getting continuously modified by background Photos-related processes) and I'm sure I will get distracted by a different shiny object soon but I've learned lots of cool and interesting stuff during my Ubiquiti adventure.