Outbound data (to WAN) question

[bmckinney (Brent McKinney)]

Hello to everyone, I’m new to the forums. I am also back from a year or so break from using Home Assistant. There has been a great deal of change to the project in that time. I was pleasantly surprised.

Hopefully this is a quick question. After my new install was up and going (vm image) I noticed a significant amount of data from the vm to AWS and them more out via SSL.

From 7/27 to 8/1 roughly 13 GB of data has been transmitted by this vm image and almost 10 GB of it has gone to AWS.

My question…is this typical for a relatively basic Home Assistant install? I am just trying to determine if this is a problem or if I need to start digging.

Thanks
Brent

[silvrr]

What components are you running?

The speedtest component can use a bit of data if you have a very quick connection.

Just being AWS doesn’t really narrow it down, so much stuff runs off of AWS these days.

If you are using Hass.io, the supervisor regularly checks with AWS for update status, this alone isn’t going to add up to 13GB though.

How did you determine the communication with AWS?

Is there anything else running on the same hardware?

[bmckinney (Brent McKinney)]

@silvrr

What components are you running?

• I connect to a vera controller, myq garage doors, ring door bells (but I don’t automatically download the videos)
• I have the unifi controller add-on (not yet configured) and motioneye (for a local motioneyeos camera)
• I am messing with presence detection so I have the owntracks and life360 integrations active right now

@silvrr

The speedtest component can use a bit of data if you have a very quick connection.

Is the speedtest on by default? That maybe the it. I have 100/100.

@silvrr

How did you determine the communication with AWS?

I have a sophos xg firewall (home version) it told me that the activity was associated with AWS. I did a quick whois and found cloudflare as the “owner” of two of the IPs listed.

@silvrr

Is there anything else running on the same hardware?

The host is a windows box until I work out all the issues, but the firewall separates out the traffic based on IP address

Good point about what runs on AWS these days. I wouldn’t doubt it is something I have turned on. I just wanted to make sure it was me.

Thanks for your quick reply.

[silvrr]

@bmckinney

Is the speedtest on by default?

No. You have to add it manually.

Cloudflare is likely just the proxy. Tells us about as much as AWS does.

Are you sure this data is going up to AWS, not down from AWS?

@bmckinney

The host is a windows box

What else is running on the windows box?

@bmckinney

but the firewall separates out the traffic based on IP address

Are you virtualizing your HA instance to get a separate IP address?

Thats alot of data for HA for 6 days. I have only 620mb up for the same time frame. (6 down for reference)

[bmckinney (Brent McKinney)]

@silvrr

Cloudflare is likely just the proxy. Tells us about as much as AWS does.

i thought that is what cloudflare was and i have been messing with their 1.1.1.1 app on my phone, but not 13GB worth and even still the local IPs didn’t match

@silvrr

Are you sure this data is going up to AWS, not down from AWS?

yep it is egress data or data to WAN

@silvrr

Are you virtualizing your HA instance to get a separate IP address?

yeah the HA instance is in a VM…from here: VMDK the image from the getting started doc

As a reference the windows box has only used 1.5 GB during that same time.

thanks again