"owever, I want to be able to view what some of the "applicances" on my
home network are sending outbound. These would be things such as my kids
Xbox, the smart TV and a few other such devices where I would be unable to
load an application such as wireshark onto.
I was poking around my router's interface, but it doesn't really have what
I'm looking for.

Is there a way to sniff the data from all hosts on my network ?
"

On the switch/router I work on here for the space station, it has a mirror
function that is supposed to copy all traffic that meets what ever filter
rules you set up out a specific port. If your home router has this
diagnostic function, it can echo all the traffic to and from the ports used
by the Xbox, smart TV, etc to come out the same port the monitoring
computer is on with Wireshark or tcpdump going.

If your home router only has 4 ports and connects directly to the cable
modem, DSL modem, etc, then you need to get more stuff. If you buy a 8 port
switch at any other the office supply or big box electronics stores, you
can plug every device in the house to it, and then uplink it to one port on
your modem/router. But you would still either need to find a true, half
duplex, all ports connect to the same wire hub that connects all the ports
together in one shared bandwidth local group, and place that between the
switch that holds all the devices in the house in one port and the
modem/router in another port to record all ethernet traffic.

Another approach is to have a fairly fast computer with (2) ethernet cards.
Connect one to the modem/router, the other to the switch with all your
ehternet devices and fire up Linux with routing enabled. This will force
all traffic to flow through the Linux computer, which means that every bit
of traffic can be tcpdumped or Wiresharcked.

Mike
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"Creativity is intelligence having fun." — Albert Einstein