Troubleshooting Tip: Unable to stop the GUI packet capture tool running on FortiGate GUI

In the FortiGate GUI, there is an option to run the packet capture tool for a specific interface, host and port under 'Network -> Diagnostics -> Packet Capture'.

Sometimes, this GUI packet capture tool gets stuck on the FortiGate GUI and cannot be stopped with the Stop button in the GUI.

If this case is encountered, it is possible to restart the node process on FortiGate using a CLI command.

The node process is responsible for the handling several tasks related to the FortiOS Web GUI, including report management, WebSockets, Web CLI in the GUI, and proxying traffic to/from the administrative web GUI.

fnsysctl killall node 

The above command will restart the node process, which will further help with stopping the packet capture and downloading/deleting the captured packets.

Related document:

Technical Tip: High memory usage of node process