FortiGate devices with NP6 (Network Processor 6) acceleration offload traffic directly to hardware, bypassing the CPU for improved performance. When auto-asic-offload is enabled in a firewall policy, most of the traffic does not reach the CPU, which means it won't be captured by the standard sniffer trace command.
Since NP6-accelerated traffic is handled entirely in hardware, only a small portion of initial packets (such as session setup packets or exceptions) might be seen in the sniffer output. To capture all packets, the administrator must disable hardware offloading using:
config firewall policy
edit <policy_ID>
set auto-asic-offload disable
end
Disabling ASIC offload forces traffic to be processed by the CPU, allowing the sniffer tool to capture all packets.