Chapter 7 Firewall : Security policies : Firewall policies : Firewall policy parameters : Service
  
Service
The service or service chosen here respresent the TCP/IP suite port numbers that will most commonly be used to transport the named protocols or group of protocols. This will be a little different than Application Control which looks more closely at the packets to determine the actual protocol used to create them.
Without all six (possibly 8) of these things matching, the traffic will be declined. Each traffic flow requires a policy and the direction is important as well. Just because packets can go from point A to point B on port X does not mean that the traffic can flow from point B to point A on port X. A policy must be configured for each direction.
When designing a policy there is often reference to the traffic flow, but most communication is a two way connection so trying to determine the direction of the flow can be somewhat confusing. If traffic is HTTP web traffic the user sends a request to the web site, but most of the traffic flow will be coming from the web site to the user. Is the traffic flow considered to be from the user to the web site, the web site to the user or in both directions? For the purposes of determining the direction for a policy the important factor is the direction of the initiating communication. The user is sending a request to the web site so this is the initial communication and the web site is just responding to it so the traffic will be from the users network to the Internet.
A case where either side can initiate the communication like between two internal interfaces on the FortiGate unit would be a more likely situation to require a policy for each direction.