RASPBERRY PI

I believe personally that everyone who nerds out should own a Pi. They are a cheaper devices that can be used for projects like network monitoring and diagnostics with almost endless capability dependent on compute power and user knowledge. You can set up Pi using Pi-hole for DNS request monitoring and ad blocking or use Wireshark for traffic analysis among other things. With either of these two setup examples you get real time monitoring, anomaly detection and even troubleshooting capabilities all from a cost effective device. These are the two examples of things i have recently used mine for.