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    A few questions about logging and reporting tools

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • T
      templateunheard
      last edited by

      I'm making a pfSense to fit a purpose and it's going to have a few features such as multi-wan load balancing/failover, IPS solutions and a couple of other things, but I've yet to find a way to enable logging of, searching of and reporting of a few things that I need. Below are the questions I currently have:

      1. In load balancing, is there a way to monitor the uptime of connections (how long it's been up, if it's currently up etc and maybe historical uptime eg WAN1 went down 2 weeks ago for 5mins or anything similar to that)
      2. Monitoring of each device on the network for uptime, performance, outages etc - so far I'm leaning towards using darkstat, would that fulfill all the above needs and is there a native pfSense alternative? And is there a way to get historical data for all the above as session by session data is ok but I'd prefer something more long-term.
      3. Monitoring of network performance - Is there any way of logging data across multiple restarts? I need to measure downtime over an extended period of time, things like WAN outages, connection issues and anything else would apply
      4. Logging of all network traffic - is there a way to save these files so they're not gone upon restart? I want to be able to export them into other network analyser tools

      I've looked into a syslog server but I'd prefer to keep in within pfSense if possible. I greatly appreciate any help given, I'd be happy to clarify any points above in later comments. Thanks all.

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      • T
        templateunheard @templateunheard
        last edited by

        @templateunheard bump, still in need of answers if anyone's able

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        • M
          mcury @templateunheard
          last edited by

          @templateunheard I personally like nfsen+nfdump.
          You would need a server to install nfsen+nfdump..

          Then, you install softflowd in pfsense and export data to this server..

          There were some limitations, but it was good to check all the flows you would need.

          dead on arrival, nowhere to be found.

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by stephenw10

            Yes exporting syslog and netflow data is the way to go for that.

            Long term data is not intended to be held in pfSense directly.

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