pfSense Monitoring and Diagnostics - Graphs and Logs

pfSense includes a comprehensive set of monitoring and diagnostics tools for tracking system health, analyzing network traffic, and troubleshooting infrastructure issues. Built-in monitoring capabilities require no additional configuration - data collection begins automatically upon installation. For deeper analysis, the platform offers network diagnostics utilities, packet capture functionality, and integration with external monitoring systems.

Monitoring data is stored in RRD (Round-Robin Database) files, which maintain a fixed storage footprint while preserving long-term observation history. Event logs are written to text files with periodic rotation and can be forwarded to remote syslog servers for long-term retention and SIEM analysis.

In This Section

• Monitoring Graphs - RRD traffic graphs per interface, CPU load, memory usage, firewall states, and external monitoring via SNMP
• System Logs - viewing event logs, remote syslog configuration, firewall log filtering, and SIEM integration
• Diagnostics Tools - ping, traceroute, DNS lookup, packet capture, states table, ARP table, and system activity

Related Sections

• Firewall Rules - configuring filtering rules whose logging output appears in system logs
• pfSense Wazuh Integration - forwarding pfSense logs to Wazuh SIEM for centralized security analysis
• Multi-WAN - multiple WAN link configuration with quality monitoring displayed on graphs