What happens when Monitoring is off, or Emergency Access is on?

When you're trying to identify issues on your network or allow a device special access, pausing Firewalla's blocking rules and policies can be very helpful. Firewalla provides two options for disabling your box's control over what your device, network, or device group can access:

• Emergency Access allows you to choose whether your device's, network's, or group's Internet access is controlled by Firewalla. When you turn on Emergency Access, Firewalla can no longer enforce the site-blocking policies you have in place.
• The Monitoring button allows you to control whether your device, network, or group is monitored by Firewalla or not. When Monitoring is turned off, Firewalla will not check traffic or block any connections. 

While Emergency Access and turning Monitoring off do similar things, they function in different ways. We've listed the features that are paused during each feature in the table below:

Additional Details

When Monitoring is on, DNS settings on the device are overridden.

When Monitoring is off, Firewalla just process packets based on the original destination, meaning Firewalla forwards the DNS query to the destination that your local device wants. If there is a DNS server or DNS and IP manually configured locally on a device, not Firewalla, the DNS query will be forwarded to that DNS server.

When nothing is configured on a local device and Firewalla is in:

• Router/DHCP mode: Your local device will get DNS server information when it gets an IP via DHCP session. Firewalla DNS queries based on what you configured in the LAN/WAN DNS servers configured in Firewalla the app (see Firewalla DNS Services. If your device was set with a static IP locally, not Firewalla, DNS is defined by whatever you set on your local device, similar to setting the IP on the client above.
• Bridge/Simple mode: Your local devices will get IP from the router via DHCP session. The router will set a DNS server while assigning Ip to your local device. Your local device will use it as the DNS server. If Firewalla see the traffic, it will process the traffic to that server as it should.