Device detection via network - question

Identifying Devices in Your Home
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Hi.
Does anyone know the protocols or ports used by Sense to do n/w detection? I have VLAN based isolation in my home and all my iOT devices run off a VLAN whereas my work computers and other work related stuff work off a different VLAN. Anyways, my Sense did detect “Others” which perhaps are my Unifi access points, switches, gateways but would be great if I knew what’s the backend protocol then perhaps I could create targeted firewall rules.

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Details on NDI are here

“Sense is not able to inspect any content since it only listens for broadcast messages (sent via SSDP/UPnP, Zeroconf, and ARP). No other traffic on your network is captured or inspected.”

This blog post I think may need a little updating to accommodate tweaks to NDI and specific network device detection and how that is used for electrical disaggregation.

Something to note is that just because a device is signalling on/off doesn’t mean Sense can then infer accurate electrical usage. e.g. If you have a large UniFi PoE switch, Sense won’t necessarily know that it’s loaded up with powered devices itself but the NDI could help … whereas a particular model AppleTV of known-constant-ish wattage could in theory closely approximate actually usage through NDI on/off signals … although in general NDI will work better (be more accurate from a power tracking standpoint) with larger constant-power NDI devices.

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Two things:

  • Not sure what “Others” you are talking about, but the “Other” bubble in the Sense bubble display is just the remaining power after all the detected power and Always On power is subtracted off. Just a remainder.
  • As for protocols, Sense mainly listens for the types of broadcasts @ixu has pointed to. Here’s more of an explanation of what Sense does with those messages.
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Hi ixu,
I have the same issue here. Since it is looking for broadcasts, there is now way the Sense Monitor is going to see traffic from my other vlans. Have you worked out a solution for this?

Thanks!
Jon

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SSDP can use 239.255.255.250
You can try enabling multicast to see if they communicate with each other.

My WLC blocks this traffic. I had to put my sense NDI devices on older/dumber WAPs.

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Nope. Nothing.

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