Switches, ports and optics

The LAN tab shows every switch, gateway and access point in your UniFi Network console, drawn as its front panel, with the faults the UniFi app mostly doesn't surface: errors climbing on a port, links that have slowed down, half duplex, and fibre optics running hot or dim.

Device rows

Each device is one row. Closed, it shows the name, model and firmware, its vitals (CPU, memory, temperature, fan, uptime), a strip of every port in its own colours, and a pill: ok, the number of alerts, or offline.

• A row with an alert opens by itself. Click a row to open or close it; your browser remembers that choice for each device.
• Expand all and Collapse all at the top open or close every row and forget the choices you made.

The faceplate

An open row draws the switch's front panel: odd ports on the top row, even ports on the bottom, fibre (SFP) cages split off to the right. A port on screen is where your finger goes on the rack.

Colour	Means
Aqua	Fibre, link up
Slate	Copper, link up
Grey, unfilled	No link
Amber, with a corner flag	A warning: a slow link, half duplex, flapping, errors trickling up, or an optic getting marginal
Red	Errors climbing fast (1 a second or more), or an optic out of range

The bar at the foot of each port is its speed, one segment per step: 100M, 1G, 2.5G, 5G, 10G and up. Colour never means speed.

Port detail

Click a port for its detail panel: link speed and duplex, the best in 30 days, when it moved to this speed, error and byte counters, PoE draw, and, for a fibre port, the optic's make, temperature, receive and transmit power.

On a port whose switch reports them, VLANs shows what it carries: untagged 10 · tagged 20, 30, or all others tagged for a UniFi port that allows every network. SNMP switches report them through Q-BRIDGE-MIB; UniFi ports through their port profile, with each network's VLAN number.

Each alert on the port comes with what to check, such as "Clean the connectors at both ends first". Below that is a graph of the port's errors per second over the last six hours. It reads Not enough history yet for a trend for the first few minutes after install. Press Close or Esc to shut the panel.

Reserving a port

New in the next release

This is on the dev and qa builds now, and in the next release.

Keep a port for something planned, such as an uplink or a client's equipment, so capacity planning never counts it free when it checks adding a host.

1. Sign in as an admin. Reserving is a paid feature.
2. On the LAN tab, click the port.
3. In its detail panel, type what it's kept for, such as uplink to core-b, planned, and click Reserve this port.

From the next poll the port has a dashed outline on the faceplate, its tooltip says reserved with your note, and its detail panel says who reserved it and when. Update changes the note; Free it takes the reservation off. Each is in Settings → Audit log.

A reserved port is never counted free, whatever its link. Reservations are kept in the settings store, so they're in a settings export. If the license lapses they stop showing and stop counting, and come back with it.

What raises a port or device alert

Alert	When
Port errors climbing	Errors rose since the last poll. Critical at 1 a second. Stays up for 10 minutes after the last rise
Port flapping	5 or more link drops in an hour (warning)
Link slower than usual	Linked slower than this port has run in the last 30 days (warning)
Half duplex	At any speed (warning). Usually one end is set to a fixed speed and the other to auto
Optic hot	Warning at 65 °C, critical at 75 °C
Optic signal low	Receive power warning at −14 dBm, critical at −20 dBm
Device offline, Device overheating	Critical
Chassis hot	Warning at 75 °C, critical at 85 °C
Fan high	90% or more (warning)

Error counters on a switch add up from its last reboot, so a big number on its own means nothing. Ferrule only alerts while they are rising.

Why a 100 Mb/s printer doesn't turn amber

A slow link is judged against the port's own last 30 days, not against what the switch can do. A printer that has only ever run at 100 Mb/s is fine. A port that ran at 1 Gb/s yesterday and 100 Mb/s today has usually lost a pair in the cable. The first speed Ferrule sees on a port is its starting point, so it can't warn about a port it has never seen run faster.

Computers that sleep

A computer asleep with wake-on-LAN drops its port to 100 Mb/s, which would warn every night. When a port has dropped to 100 Mb/s and come back twice in 30 days, its slow-link alert offers It sleeps: ignore 100 Mb/s here, in Needs attention and in the port detail.

Clicking it, in any edition, adds the port to PORT_SLEEPS under Settings → Stack environment. Copy the line into the stack and redeploy. You can also write it yourself, as the switch's MAC and the port number:

PORT_SLEEPS=78:45:58:aa:bb:cc/12, 78:45:58:aa:bb:cc/14

PortainerDocker Compose

1. Open the ferrule stack and find Environment variables.
2. Add or change the lines. In Advanced mode you can paste several at once.
3. Click Pull and redeploy.

1. Open .env in the folder where you cloned ferrule-deploy.
2. Add or change the lines.
3. Run docker compose up -d in that folder.

After that, drops to 100 Mb/s or lower on those ports stop warning. A drop to anything faster, such as 10G coming back at 1G, still warns. With a license or the trial, the click saves at once with no redeploy: see Alert thresholds.

Fibre optics

Fibre ports show the optic's temperature and receive power, and alert at the levels in the table above. If a fibre port's detail says This platform is not reporting module diagnostics for this cage, the hardware isn't sending the readings. That is common on gateway SFP+ ports: see What your hardware won't report.

Colours for your own eyes

Settings → Display sets the levels at which readings turn amber or red, in your browser only. They can add highlighting but never hide or change an alert.

If something's wrong

What you see	Why, and the fix
No LAN tab	UNIFI_ENABLED=false is set
An error message instead of devices	Ferrule can't read the console. The message says why; see UniFi Network
A switch shows offline	The controller reports it offline. It has no readings until it reconnects
No error graph, History unavailable	VictoriaMetrics isn't reachable: see History and graphs

More in Troubleshooting.