A session is a communication channel between two devices or applications across the network. Sessions enable FortiOS to inspect and act on a sequential group of packets in a session all together instead of inspecting each packet individually. Each of these sessions has an entry in the session table that includes important information about the session.

Session tables are useful troubleshooting tools because they allow you to verify connections that you expect to see open. For example, if you have a web browser open to browse the Fortinet website, you would expect a session entry from your computer, on port 80, to the IP for the Fortinet website. Another troubleshooting method is if there are too many sessions for FortiOS to process, you can examine the session table for evidence why this is happening.

The FortiGate session table can be viewed from either the CLI or the web-based manager. The most useful troubleshooting data comes from the CLI. The session table in web-based manager also provides some useful summary information, particularly the current policy number that the session is using.