A review of Monitor-IO, a little gadget that wants to talk about your Internet

Monitor-IO is a $100 IoT gadget that tells you whether your Internet is working well, poorly, or not at all. The idea is you put this little black box next to (and plugged directly into) your router, and a quick glance at its color-coded screen will let you know if the Internet’s working solidly, if it’s having some problems, or if everything is just plain out. Monitor-IO even promises to tell users granular details like how long a connection has been up, or sketchy, or out.

All of this raises the question: do you need a gadget for that?

Tap, tap—is this thing on?

At first glance, Monitor-IO reminded me of the butter-passing robot from Rick and Morty, doomed to a trivialized existence fulfilling an insignificant task. Look, I already know if the Internet is down! My wife and I feed and clothe three small but highly motivated Internet downtime detectors who let us know in a hurry if videos and games stop streaming to their tablets, the Rokus, etc.

Then again, there’s an entire troubleshooting flowchart burned into my brain, beginning with ping 8.8.8.8 from a wired computer, to make sure the problem is neither Wi-Fi nor DNS. From there, I’m isolating any remaining problems from switch, to router, to modem, to ISP. All the while, I know, support, and in some cases love a bunch of people who have a much simpler one-step flowchart that reads “call Jim, and say things that sound like they might be technical until the problem goes away.”

Once I remembered that reality, the appeal of this little plastic box with a cheerful LED screen and simple, human-friendly diagnostic messages was obvious. So I decided to take a closer look at the gadget.

Accepting a review unit turned out to be a good decision. Monitor-IO’s deceptively simple premise (tell me if the Internet is on or not) is backed by a surprising amount of attention to detail and accompanied by a bunch of cool additional features. The technically challenged folks can just look at the screen to see if it’s green for go, purple for “uhhh…,” or red for fail. This will rule out local problems like Wi-Fi or DNS and tell users in extremely simple terms whether the ISP’s service itself is up or down. But for more technical people—like my fellow consultants or the family members non-techy folks rely on—a whole bunch of additional functionality is a couple of clicks away. Monitor-IO marquees three different pieces of information on its screen: the current Internet uptime, the local IP address of the Monitor-IO device itself, and a reminder that you can log in to your account at monitor-io.com for more information.

The local interface is nice because it’s available even when your Internet connection is not. If you point your Web browser to the IP address flashed on Monitor-IO’s screen, you can find more details about what is or isn’t working, saving you some donkey-work in troubleshooting. You can also run a speed test—a refreshingly quick one. While it’s nowhere near as detailed as the results at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest, Monitor-IO’s speed test fully completes in a single second. This is good enough to give you an idea of whether you’re getting the speeds you should without grinding on so long it significantly interferes with other people’s downloads, Web browsing, or video streams.

The local interface isn’t bad, but, from my testing, the really cool stuff happens at https://my.monitor-io.com/. Once you log in with the username and password you got when you bought the device, you can view a detailed history of problems and alerts with your Internet connection.

You can do some pretty neat things to catalog and monitor your home network here, too. You can (and should!) assign every device on your network a friendly alias based on its MAC (hardware) address. This makes it easy to spot when you’ve got an unexpected device on your network or to figure out which of your own devices is which. Alerts can also be configured on home devices such as printers, computers, or set-top boxes so that you’ll get email notifications if they go offline. All of this takes as much pain as possible out of, for example, getting a frantic call from home about the kids not being able to watch Cartoon Network on their Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, et cetera. Instead of walking somebody through troubleshooting over the phone, you can log in to your my.monitor-io account and see instantly whether the ISP is up, whether your local network is up, and whether the device your roommate/significant other/child is frantic about has connectivity. You’ll even know if any of the above have been spotty for the last hour/day/week.

How does this stuff work?

This is one of the things I appreciate most about Monitor-IO: instead of doing constant (and destructive) speedtests like some of the higher-end Wi-Fi mesh kits, Monitor-IO emits a relatively steady stream of very low-bandwidth UDP packets to a configurable set of geographic regions. The device then gauges the quality of your Internet connection by its absolute latency, the degree of inconsistency in its latency, and whether it doesn’t actually make it home. (Unlike TCP, the UDP protocol does not guarantee delivery of a packet. If it’s lost, it stays lost.)

I didn’t want to take the manufacturer’s word for “about 14 Kbps” bandwidth consumed by Monitor-IO’s continual 24/7 quality monitoring of my Internet connection. Luckily, I’m still rocking my Ubuntu-based Homebrew Router, so intercepting my Monitor-IO device’s traffic with tcpdump and then analyzing it with Wireshark was a snap.

Just like it said on the tin, Monitor-IO’s quality-measurement telemetry averaged out to about 14Kbps. More specifically, it consists of frequent bursts of tiny UDP traffic, peaking at around 0.3Mbps. That isn’t a big deal even on a severely old-school 1.5Mbps DSL connection, let alone most modern broadband plans. All this measurement will take a toll on most LTE plans, unfortunately: that 6MB per hour comes out to just under 5GB per month. AT&T’s biggest LTE modem plan is currently $40 per month for a brutally low 5GB of data. Monitor-IO would consume that all by itself. Even if you’ve managed to shoehorn yourself into an “unlimited” plan, you can get throttled after your first 22GB per month, and Monitor-IO’s 5-ish GB every month is an uncomfortably large bite of that.

Life’s better with a butter-passing robot

I went into testing this device pretty jaded. I thought it was going to be a marginal gadget that would appeal mostly to severely technically challenged folks, meaning it’d be of little use to the typical Ars reader. But once I really started digging into what Monitor-IO did—and how it does it—the obvious technical chops and real, careful attention to detail won me over.

Yes, Monitor-IO will still definitely appeal to those folks who have no idea whether the Wi-Fi or Internet is down or if the one sketchy website they’re trying over and over to load is causing their frustration. But this device also provides a wealth of telemetry and information to those with a little (or a lot) of technical know-how, and it does this without periodically screwing up your Internet connection. (I’m looking at you, mesh kits and routers that do automatic, periodic speed tests!)