Determining Data Use at a Specific Time

[jdag]

Is there a way to determine what was being processed by an iPhone at a certain time?

The reason I ask is that I received a notice about getting close to my monthly data limit yesterday. I reviewed the data usage by line, and found that my son's phone had used about 350mb worth of data at 4:10pm yesterday. It was a time when we were in the car for about a 15 minute drive. I am not sure if the time marking of 4:10pm was the start of the usage or then end of the usage.

He said that he was only listening to music at the time (locally stored music, not streaming).

My thinking would be that maybe some background apps had started downloading when home, and maybe continued when in the car. Or, possibly an iCloud backup.

Anyhow, I'd like to try to determine what had occurred to avoid it in the future.

 

[scaredpoet]

Unfortunately, there's two things working against you: there's no time-based log of data usage on iOS apps, and AT&T's billing isn't always accurate. This is because the data sessions itemized on the bill tend to show when the session ended, and a "session" doesn't necessarily end right away.

It's possible for an phone to be "connected" to the data network during a session, but not actually doing anything for many hours... or slowly downloading things over several hours.... OR, downloading data at the beginning and then staying dormant for several hours before the network finally decides to end that session.

What you might want to do is configure your son's phone so that it doesn't use cellular data to automatically download new apps, songs or movies. This will force the iPhone to wait until it's on Wifi to do those things, and hopefully avoid any surprises.

 

[jdag]

Thanks...that's exactly what I expected. This has never been an issue before, and we've never gone over our allotment. I will watch it more closely.