Monitoring- DumaOS Part 1

Monitoring the Nighthawk XR500 on a desktop browser is the best way to go about it, especially as NETGEAR has worked with another networking manufacturer, Netduma, to create their gaming-specialized networking features via DumaOS. Netduma likes to call DumaOS an "operating system for your home", and their R1 router had these features NETGEAR must have clearly found good enough. As it is, what you are seeing in the image above is the DumaOS dashboard, which is a single page that summarizes router settings and activity at a glance. These various sections that take up the majority of your screen are pinned objects available in other menus that are accessed on the left, and you may have already seen that I have customized my dashboard already compared to the default dashboard seen on the previous page. The dashboard allows easy movement and resizing of the objects to where, if you are familiar with widgets on Android, these will seem very familiar as well.


The DumaOS dashboard is an "R-app" as per Netduma, and I find this a liberal use of simplification for the masses. As it is, think of each R-app (router app) as one of the features available in the browser monitoring utility. If the dashboard may not seem like an app of its own, then the geo-filter feature certainly will. It is, in my opinion, the main gaming-centric feature of DumaOS that makes the Nighthawk XR500 a gaming router. This menu page allows you to select your location on a world map depiction on screen to then select a localized zone within a set distance of your choosing for online gaming activity. Think of this in terms of being able to select local host servers for online games so as to have a short ping to the server and back, which is especially handy for gaming consoles that do not allow server selection for even the more popular games. You can associate a geo-filter to a profile tied to specific games as well, and also select the specific device on the network for said geo-filter to be applied. There is also a more specific allow/deny list at the bottom over which you can whitelist or blacklist certain connections regardless of the geo-filter, which is more commonly seen with networking utilities, but remains appreciated here as well. In the context of gaming, it can help block laggy servers, although note that dedicated servers tied to applications can not be blocked. Similarly, if you wanted to game with a friend half-way across the world despite a less-than-optimal ping, this will allow whitelisting and a bypass of the geo-filter.


Next up is the QoS (Quality of Service) menu, which is also an "R-app". This is pretty self-explanatory in what it does, in terms of identifying the devices on the network and how the bandwidth distribution is for all these devices. As such, by simply using the mouse on the distribution map seen on screen, you can prioritize bandwidth to specific devices. Clicking on a device also brings up a window to be more precise in the percentile bandwidth allocation, say a PC or console over a smart home device. DumaOS also has an automatic priority mode by default, should you wish to use it, wherein games, Skype calls, and other low-latency applications are prioritized for traffic both ways of the network. You can easily disable this by unchecking the DumaOS Classified Games service at the bottom of the menu as seen above.


The next two menus are Device Manager and Network Monitor, and these are also R-apps, so at this point, I am beginning to think everything is an R-app. Regardless, the device manager menu pulls up the network map of various devices and the networks that are in place—be it WAN, LAN, or Wi-Fi (guest or otherwise). This helps with identifying a rogue device connected to your network, say, or even with ensuring that a device meant to be on the 2.4 GHz wireless-N network is on it. The network monitor menu gives a live snapshot and overview of the traffic consumption by connected devices, which in my cases was usually just my computer or a borrowed gaming console used to test the geo-filter feature mentioned above.


The penultimate menu, also an R-app, as you might have guessed by now, is called System Information. I do like what NETGEAR, via DumaOS, tried here, but I am just not sure if there is enough interest to have such a utility tied to a networking portal that is not often utilized. Regardless, it can be handy to quickly monitor how the router hardware is doing when changing other parameters in DumaOS. Here, for example, we get quick snapshot views of the CPU, RAM, and flash memory usage of the router. It can be handy if you happen to have more R-apps installed, although that really is not an option at this time. That said, in case the router is not performing optimally, you can try disabling some of the R-apps from launching on router start-up and do a device reboot to see if that helps. There is also a system log at the bottom that can be very handy in resolving network-related issues you may be facing.