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I installed my Firewalla Purple yesterday and am getting used to it but finding some frustrations. If anyone has advice or comments on these, plesae let me know. It's a long list, so read through and comment on one or two that you have experience with. (I will also continue to research these on my own, but you might be able to provide me your experience.) By the way, I'm coming from a eero mesh network using its router function...which I chose for the mesh network AND for eero's ability to provide device-level details. I only recently learned that eero can still support the mesh network while in "bridge" mode--which allowed me to insert the Firewalla between my AT&T Fiber modem and the eero mesh network.OVERALL: I'm finding the user interface not to be very intuitive...and am having trouble finding things. I guess I'll learn, but did anyone else find that? What I would perfer is to pick a level of the device hierarchy (network/group/device) and then be able to view data and act on that level...to view usage, flows, rules-in-effect, create a rule, turn on/off blocks, etc. It has some of that, but it also seems to have an alternative path for Alarms and Rules. (For instance, you can navigate down to a specific device and see Rules, but you cannot see Alarms on the device.)MANY NOTIFICATIONS: Immediately after installing the Firewalla, I received all sorts of notifications about devices joining the network--as expected--and bandwidth being used by specific devices. I assume these calm down (far fewer) as the Firewalla learns the devices and usage in my jome network. Is that the case?NOTIFICATION RULES: I had hoped that Firewalla rules would include "notification rules" (or at least that's what I would expect them to be called), but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, it appears it provides only far-more limiting "alarms" (which, as an aside, I consider an incorrect term for what it is). For instance, I don't see an way I can be notified when, say, a specific TV has been watching Netflix for more than 2 hours.MUTING ALARMS: Instead, it appears that I moslty should just wait to get an "Alarm" and then mute it. (That's not a terrible approach, but different than I think which is to configure what I want to see ahead of time.)MISSING ALARMS: But I'm not getting some expected Alarms. After running for over 24 hours, my Firewalla still doesn't show any "Device Online/Offline" Alarms. I had hoped to use this to see when devices "arrive" on my network.BLOCK DEVICES THAT I DON'T KNOW: The main reason I wanted to move away from the eero router function was that I understood that Firewalla could block private MAC addresses, but MAC address isn't an option in the Firewalla Rules matching. Eero cannot do this--which makes much of eero's device level monitoring and control close to WORTHLESS. That is, what's the point of device level control when the device can simply pretend to be a different device and change whenever it wants to? This is a huge weakness in eero! However, I'm guessing the recommended Firewalla approach is to put any unknown devices in the "Quarantine" Group, and using that to block access however I want. Is that the best approach?AD BLOCK PROBLEM: When I initially set it up, various webites wouldn't render because the browser couldn't get a response from googleadservices.com ...because (I assume) the "strict" setting of Ad Block blocks that site. I assume whatever link I clicked on got redirected to googleadservices.com before being sent back to the target web page...and that, of course, failed. Setting "Ad Block" to default resolved this specific problem.ANOTHER AD BLOCK PROBLEM: ...but, I still had other webpages that rendered slowly or not at all. Have others of you seen that with blocked ads? I'm wondering if the browser is consumed trying to get to the blocked site. For now, I've turned "Ad Block" off entirely. (I previously had eero's ad blocker turned on and never had a problem.)UI FOR BLOCKING ADS: I did see where I could turn on a rule to override Ad Block--but it's in rules, not within "Ad Block." It's like Firewalla has two different ways to address the same (Ads) problem, and they are in different sections of the app (Ad Block vs. Rules). Does that make sense to anyone but the programmers at Firewalla?DEVICE METADATA: I was surprised to find that, other than configuring a device to a group, I didn't see anywhere to list device's location or additional comments. That is, "asset management" kinds of stuff (location, purchase date, owner, OS, OS version, installed storage, etc.) "Asset management" seems like it could be a great enhancement to Firewalla without a lot of additional effort. Even just storing a JSON field that could be populated with custom-built apps would go a long way.USERS: I see there is a new feature called "Users," but I don't see how that is really any different from Groups. What am I not understanding?UNDERSTANDING TRAFFIC: I am seeing a lot of traffic to "unexplained" urls...although after a closer look, I can guess. For instance, photos.googleapis.com, iCloud-content.com, amazonaws.com, and loadingtest.com (not as sure what this is)....and, from the programmer in me, it seems like the Firewalla UI / App / Web Dashboard isn't going to meet all my requirements, so...DASHBOARDS: Has anyone integrated this with other dashboards? e.g. Sharptools, Hubtiat, DAKboard, Cozyla, or just a custom website? (An example would be showing and coloring a "card" on a dashboard for a certain device if it is present, in use, exceeding thresholds, or using certain apps (e.g. Netflix)...not unlike a home automation dashboard that shows if a light is on, dimmed, or off.)DOWNLOAD DEVICE LIST: Has anyone written an export of devices by MAC address? I keep an inventory of all my devices in a spreadsheet (although I should probably make it a database) to address the "asset management" need I mentioned above.PRICED PLANS: Am I correct in understanding that I'll need to pay for Firewalla MSP Professional to use any of the APIs?WEBHOOKS/EVENT APIs/IFTTT: Do any of the APIs notify my program of an event? https://firewalla.net/ mentions "API & Webhooks for Integration," but I don't see any way to program webhooks through the API documentation. (The "msp-api-examples" on github do have a "send-alarms-to-discord," but looking at the code, it seems it sends the alarms only when it is run...and send all the alarms from that last 24 hours. I guess that's a good as an example, but not very useful as-is.)Are there any limits (practical or enforced) to the frequency of API calls? I could envision wanting to update certain data about my network every 15 minutes. (Other data could be refreshed on demand or daily.)OK, so I know that's a lot, but any help would be welcomed!
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