Collecting network traffic over a hub

Need to run this by you guys to see if I am going about this the right way...

I have a pfSense box connected to a wireless AP which is connected via ethernet to the smartbridge. The pfSense box is doing all the routing.

I need to do some network diagnostics and would like to collect network traffic going outbound from Alexa. I was going to put a hub from pfSense to wireless AP to collect traffic. Will this work? I know you can packet capture on pfSense but I would prefer to do it from my laptop. If that works, can you recommend a inexpensive good hub?

Yes it would work, fire up wireshark and start collecting.

maybe look for an managed switch, it would do the some thing, most switches support setting up an monitor port, that replicates all traffic on an given port.

but look at ebay for an cheap 10/100Mbit hub, and you would be good to go.

Pfsense does packet capture. Take a look in the diagnostics menu, set the IP to Alexa's and enjoy.

If you're buying a hub for this purpose, look into one of the cheap 5-port Mikrotiks. They have a small 5-port switch that is managed and that you can run a span/mirror port on, instead of using an actual hub for this.

Thanks for the responses, that helped me out a lot.

After researching hubs for a bit and seeing how expensive they can be for low 10/100 performance, I was thinking about a 10/100/1000 5 port Dualcomm that can port mirror http://www.dual-comm.com/gigabit_port-mirroring-LAN_switch.htm

Seems packed full of features for a decent price. Anyone used these before?