Available Widgets

Each widget contains a specific set of data, type of information, graph, etc. This section lists each of the currently available widgets along with their settings (if any). These are listed in alphabetical order.

Captive Portal Status

This widget shows the current list of online captive portal users, including their IP address, MAC address, and username.

CARP Status

The CARP Status widget displays a list of all CARP type Virtual IP addresses, along with their status as either MASTER or BACKUP.

Disks

The Disks widget contains information on disk layout and usage. This content was formerly part of the System Information widget, but was moved to its own widget and redesigned.

The widget contains a tree view of the disks in the firewall, entries can be expanded to view details about additional ZFS datasets and mountpoints.

The Disk widget settings allow pinning specific items so they the widget always their status. It also allows changing the usage threshold at which items are always shown, which can help identify disk locations which may need attention.

Dynamic DNS

The Dynamic DNS widget displays a list of all configured Dynamic DNS hostnames, their current address, and status.

Firewall Logs

The Firewall Logs widget provides an AJAX-updating view of the firewall log. The number of rows shown by the widget is configurable. As with the normal firewall log view, clicking the action icon next to the log entry will show a window displaying which rule caused the log entry. Clicking the source or destination IP address will copy that value to Diagnostics > DNS where the address can be resolved.

Gateways

The Gateways widget lists all of the system gateways along with their current status. The status information consists of the gateway IP address, Round Trip Time (RTT) also known as delay or latency, the amount of packet loss, and the status (Online, Warning, Down, or Gathering Data). The widgets is updated every few seconds via AJAX.

GEOM Mirror Status

This widget will show the status of a gmirror RAID array on the system, if one is configured. The widget will show if the array is online/OK (Complete), rebuilding, or degraded.

Installed Packages

The Installed Packages widget lists all of the packages installed on the system, along with some basic information about them such as the installed version and whether or not an update is available.

When a package has an update available, is displayed next to the version number. Packages may be updated from this widget by clicking the button at the end of a package’s row.

Packages may also be reinstalled by clicking or removed by clicking .

Interface Statistics

This widget shows a grid, with each interface on the system shown in its own column. Various interface statistics are shown in each row, including packet, byte, and error counts.

Interfaces

The Interfaces widget differs from the Interface Statistics widget in that it displays general information about the interface rather than counters. The Interfaces widget shows the type and name of each interface, IPv4 address, IPv6 address, the interface link status (up or down), as well as the link speed when available.

IPsec

The IPsec widget has three tabs:

Overview:

A count of active and inactive tunnels.

Tunnel Status:

Lists each configured IPsec tunnel (P1 and P2) and whether that tunnel is up or down. Each entry has controls to connect or disconnect based on its current status.

Mobile:

Shows online remote access IPsec VPN users, such as those using IKEv2 or Xauth.

Netgate Services and Support

Displays the current support status for this firewall instance from Netgate servers. The widget also includes information about support resources and how to contact support.

NTP Status

The NTP Status widget shows the current NTP synchronization source and the server time from that source.

OpenVPN

The OpenVPN widget displays the status of each configured OpenVPN instance, for both servers and clients. The status of each instance is shown, but the style and type of information shown varies depending on the type of OpenVPN connection. For example, with SSL/TLS servers in client/server mode the widget shows a list of all connected clients. For peer-to-peer mode instances such as shared key clients and servers, the widget displays an up/down status. In each case it displays the IP address of the connecting client with the name and time of the connection.

Picture

The Picture widget, as the name implies, displays a picture chosen by the user. This can either be used functionally, for a network diagram or similar, or it can be for style, displaying a company logo or other image.

To add an image:

• Click on the Picture widget title bar

• Click Browse to locate the picture to upload

• Click Upload to upload the picture

The size of the picture will adjust to fit the area of the widget, which can vary depending on the size of the browser and platform.

RSS

The RSS (RDFSite Summary, or as it’s often called, Really Simple Syndication) widget will display an arbitrary RSS feed. By default, it shows the Netgate blog RSS feed. Some people choose to show internal company RSS feeds or security site RSS feeds, but it can load any RSS feed.

In addition to defining the RSS feeds to display, the number of stories and size of displayed content are also configurable.

S.M.A.R.T. Status

If S.M.A.R.T. is enabled on a drive in the firewall, this widget will show a brief status of the drive integrity as reported by S.M.A.R.T.

Services Status

This widget provides the same view and control of services that appears under Status > Services. Each service is listed along with its description, status (Running, Stopped), and start/restart/stop controls.

System Information

This widget is the main widget, displaying a wide array of information about the running system. The information displayed includes:

Name:

The configured fully qualified hostname of the firewall.

User:

The user viewing the dashboard and their authentication source.

System:

The type of system, if the firewall can identify the environment. Can be a specific hardware model, a type of virtual machine, or similar string.

This section also displays the Netgate Device ID (NDI) which is used by Netgate to determine the support status for the firewall.

BIOS:

Information about the system BIOS, if it can be read by the firewall. May include the BIOS vendor, version, and release date.

Version:

The current running version of pfSense® software. The widget displays the version, architecture, and build time at the top. Beneath that, the widget prints the underlying version of FreeBSD.

At the bottom of this section, the widget prints the result of an automatic update check for a more recent version of pfSense software. This automatic update check can be disabled in the update settings.

CPU Type:

The version string for the processor, such as Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2758 @ 2.40GHz. The widget also prints the CPU count and package/core layout.

If powerd is active and the CPU frequency has been lowered, then the current frequency is shown next to the maximum frequency.

If the CPU contains hardware cryptographic features, such as AES-NI or QAT, the widget also prints the status of those items.

Hardware crypto:

If hardware cryptographic acceleration is enabled, the widget displays a list of ciphers which the hardware can accelerate.

Uptime:

Time since the firewall was last rebooted.

Current date/time:

The current date and time of the firewall, including the time zone. This is useful for comparing the log entries, especially when the time zone on the firewall is different from where the user resides.

DNS Server(s):

A lists of all configured and automatically located DNS Servers used by the firewall.

Last config change:

The date of the last configuration change on the firewall.

State table size:

A graphical and numerical representation of active connection states and the maximum possible states as configured on the firewall. Underneath the state counts is a link to view the contents of the state table.

MBUF usage:

The number of network memory buffer clusters in use, and the maximum the system has available. These network memory buffers are used for network operations, among other tasks. If the number is close to maximum or at the maximum, increase the number of available mbufs as described in Hardware Tuning and Troubleshooting.

Temperature:

The current temperature as reported by the hardware, if available.

Load Average:

A count of active processes on the firewall which are in a running state during the last 5, 10, and 15 minutes. This is typically 0.00 on an idle or lightly loaded system.

CPU usage:

A bar chart and percentage of CPU time used by the firewall.

Note

Viewing the dashboard increases the CPU usage, depending on the platform. On slower platforms this is likely to read significantly higher than it would be otherwise.

Memory usage:

The current amount of RAM in use by the system. Note that unused RAM is often allocated for caching and other tasks so it is not wasted or idle, so this number may show higher than expected even when the firewall is operating normally.

Swap usage:

The amount of swap space in use by the system. If the system runs out of physical RAM, and there is swap space available, lesser used pages of memory will be paged out to the swap file on the hard drive. This indicator only shows when the system has swap space configured.

Thermal Sensors

The Thermal Sensors widget displays the temperature from supported sensors when present. For many popular Intel and AMD-based chips, the sensors may be activated by choosing the appropriate sensor type under System > Advanced on the Miscellaneous tab under Thermal Sensors.

The widget displays a bar for each sensor, which typically corresponds to each CPU core. The warning and critical thresholds may be configured in the widget settings.

Traffic Graphs

The Traffic Graphs widget contains a live graph for the traffic on each interface. The interfaces displayed are configurable in the widget settings. The default refresh rate of the graphs is once every 10 seconds, but that may also be adjusted in the settings for this widget. The graphs are drawn the same way as those found under Status > Traffic Graph.

Wake On LAN

The Wake on LAN widget shows all of the WOL entries configured under Services > Wake on LAN, and offers a quick means to send a WOL magic packet to each system in order to wake it up. The widget also displays the current status of WOL entries, if possible. To wake up a system, click next to its entry.

ZFS

This widget is available on pfSense Plus software and displays current status of ZFS pools and their component disks.