I don’t understand why I have such high data usage reported by my Cloudflare account each month. I average about 8 Gb every month and I am only out if the house about 3 days a week. The rest of the time I am on my home WiFi.
I have 3 cell phones that have the Companion app on reporting location with high accuracy.
Rarely do I use the Companion app outside the house.
I am under the impression that the Companion app is only reporting back my location through the internet when I am out of my WiFi range. I can’t imagine this would take that much data.
Not sure how I would start to check why so much data is being used?
I use Cloudflare for Home Assistant remote access but rarely open the app when away from home.
Is there a constant exchange of data going on from Cloudflare to Home Assistant even when all phones on in the home?
Is it normal to use 8 Gig of data through Cloudflare a month? When you are not using the app remotely.
Nothing else is going through Cloudflare. I do have an ESPCam on my internal network connected to HA but not streaming to my phone or anywhere else. I do have lots of sensors and devices connected to HA but nothing constantly streaming and nothing should be going out over the internet or Cloudflare connection.
when it comes to the app biggest data drain we have seen is when it comes to things in the dashboard, anything that is streaming like a camera or webpage (like weather radar) ends up keeping the connection open draining battery and using data. The only way to avoid this is to make sure the camera/website is not in the view when you leave the app. So just be mindful of the state you exit the app if you don’t plan on removing the card or turning off the live stream.
If you are using SSL certificates on HTTPS, then there is a chance your local connection is set up for HTTPS also, which means the traffic is probably going around the internet.
I don’t have any speed tests enabled.
I don’t use the Companion app on my phone except maybe 1 or 2 times a month and shut it down by just closing all app.
Are you saying that because I have one ESPcam32 in HA and on the dashboard that it would constantly be sending data over the internet ( my Cloudflare) connection even though I am not running the Companion app on my phone?
Is there anything in HA that I can look at to see what it is sending outside my internal network to my Cloudflare tunnel?
If all “in/outgoing” traffic goes through one and same Router, i suggest you check there, most modern Routers have a “tab” Traffic Analyzer
Edit: or use another device to monitor/analyze out/in going traffic ( if your Router doesn’t provide sufficient detailed data.)
Remember you might have other wifi devices, connected or not connected to HA, which might be cloud depended, HA won’t monitor these devices “direct-access” to your routers wan port
I have only 1 companion app, and it’s entirely local, i don’t access HA from outside my lan, and so my traffic to/from Ha is mainly caused by i.e monthly updates, weather-forecasts , and very few cloud-depended-devices etc.
I Assume your HA-Server Traffic is “routed” through your Cloudflare Account ( whether you access it from your phone or not), unless you “bypass” your Cloudflare/SSL-account , which is why you see this amount there.
In your Router or any other traffic analyzer you will notice “spikes” whenever you i.e update HA, Add-Ons etc( like i.e external backups, or auto-updates of device firmwares )), which is where/when the highest usage occurs ( under normal circumstances ) … and who knows your 3phones maybe keeps reporting high-accuracies location, as-well as all your sensors-devices are regularly reporting state/state-changes(regardless if you don’t have your app open, thou the latest should be very little data)
So as my “Local” HA-Server “outgoing network” usage is less than 5% of Incoming Traffic, then i believe you will see a larger amount of Out-going( from your HA-Server ) , im not talking about the traffic your phone “registrar” (out/in) through your Cloudflare account( doesn’t cloudflare specify the data-usage, in any ways ?
Ok, are you suggesting that all local traffic going to my HA server is being routed out and back in to my local network through the Cloudflare tunnel?
I would have thought it would have stayed on the local network but not sure how HA is dealing with the network traffic it receives locally once Cloudflare was setup.
If you are using the Cloudflare address on any devices connection setting then yes.
The companion apps have a local and remote address option, but if the local is not filled out or it is filled out with the Cloudflare address then that traffic will also go out over the internet.
, and very few cloud-depended-devices etc.