How-to: Change default policy columns on a FortiGate

When you log into a FortiGate and browse to the policies section you will see the pre-defined default policy columns which include seq#, source, destination, schedule, service, action, nat, av etc..

I normally go through and change the columns so that they are more compact. Generally this includes adding the 'policy ID' column, removing the schedules, replacing all the UTM columns with the 'security profiles' column and moving a few others around as per below:

Now this is all well and good, except for the fact that it will only save these columns for the computer and browser that I'm using. If I connect via another browser or from another device then the default columns will show up again.

Good news is that the default columns can all be changed with a setting to ensure that the columns you want to show up by default will, no matter which browser or computer you connect from.

This is all done via the CLI with the following commands:

config system setting
set gui-default-policy-columns <list of columns you want in order>
end

To display a list of all configurable options, type in '?' after the set command (ex: set gui-default-policy-columns ?). You'll see the following configurable column options:

The way I would configure my default columns to look like the second picture would be:

config system setting
set gui-default-policy-columns policyid srcintf dstintf srcaddr dstaddr service profile action nat logtraffic count
end

Log out then back into the FortiGate and you should see your columns have changed around for good. If your browser still shows the old column settings then try to clear your history/cache and restart it.