I stopped trusting my router's diagnostics after my Raspberry Pi found what it missed

Consumer router dashboards hide critical network health details, showing devices as 'connected' even when they're cycling on and off or consuming unexpected bandwidth. Running ntopng and NetAlertX on a Raspberry Pi 4 revealed silent bandwidth hogs (unscheduled device backups), smart home devices constantly dropping and reconnecting, and DNS latency issues invisible to the router's admin panel. Installing both tools via Docker on the Pi was straightforward, and the resulting visibility led to scheduling backups, assigning static IPs, setting up a guest network, and adding Pi-hole for telemetry filtering.