Hi folks, decided to take a break from trying to coerce AI (Perplexity Pro) to do detailed analysis of my Sense results, to very different bit of analysis - Sense network traffic. My Unifi networking gear finally gave me a super easy way to capture network packets far more simply and selectively than I the past. And WireShark (packet analysis) has done a great job of categorizing what’s happening. The result - an easy trace that gives a pretty good idea of what Sense is doing on my network.
Here’s what 1 minute worth of Sense activity looks like on my network, 1170 packets in time order from left to right.
Here is the key to the various colors:
Purple - general data transfer between Sense and the Sense (Amazon Web Services) mothership.
Light Blue - TP Link protocol - Sense monitor pulling data from 30 or so smart plugs on my network
Light Green - Sense using HTTP protocol to talk to my Philips / Hue lighting
Orange - General ARP / Networking housekeeping
It was a real joy to be able to do that analysis with two simple steps without messing at all with network ports, etc.
Hi Kevin, thanks for an interesting post. You did a nice job of explaining the categories. I had to look up the acronym associated with your orange color: Address Resolution Protocol.
Your plot is in time order, but probably not time scaled. If it were time scaled, I expect there would be lots of white, assuming white means network inactivity and/or any activity not associated with Sense. The amount of white might wash out the colors, which is probably why you used time order in the first place.
If you had used time scale, I expect that the light blue would occur at predictable spacing, since Sense has to poll the smart plugs on a fixed schedule. I think the schedule is every 2 seconds for most people, although users with more than 20 smart plugs may have longer intervals. Since there are broad swaths of light blue between each swath of light green in your time ordered plot, that mean that Sense polls Philips/Hue even less frequently. This rings a bell with my observations of that integration:
Hard to tell the level of inactivity via the dump since it only gives start times, not completions of packets.
You’re right though - this is a highly filtered set of packets being dumped.
Only packets traversing one access point
On one WiFi SSID (IoT network)
Only on one band - 2.4 GHz
Further filtered by being sent or received by Sense monitor. 1170 is the total number of packets traversing that access point associated with that single SSID on just the 2.4GHz band. Of the 1170, 565 are associated with Sense.
I think Sense has had to back off my Kasa/TP-Link sampling rate substantially of time because I have 30+ devices. When I look at my Power Meter waveforms for devices on my Kasa plugs it looks like about a 10 sec sample rate which fits with the packet trace (6 blue patches in 60 seconds).
