In Part 1 we explored what makes SafeLine WAF stand out as an open-source web application firewall in 2025.
Now, let’s get our hands dirty and walk through its real-world features, dashboards, and protection mechanisms — the stuff that actually matters when your production app is under attack.
The Dashboard: Real-Time Insights
Once you log into SafeLine, the first thing you’ll notice is its clean, data-rich dashboard.
It’s not just pretty charts — it’s an actual control center for understanding traffic and attack patterns in real time.
- Active Requests, Visitors, and Blocked IPs over the last 24h, 7d, or 30d
- Geo-based attack stats (switchable between 2D & 3D globe)
- Requests per second currently hitting your app
- Top attack sources & blocked regions
Hidden gem: the Live Data Panel. Hit the toggle and you’ll see an interactive real-time view of what SafeLine is doing at the packet level. Perfect for debugging or catching ongoing floods before they escalate.
Adding & Managing Apps
In the Applications tab, adding a new web app is dead simple:
Just specify the internal address & port, and SafeLine starts protecting it instantly.
From there, you can:
- Enable/disable specific protection mechanisms (SQLi, XSS, XXE, CRLF injection, etc.)
- Switch to Advanced View to tweak SSL, Gzip compression, header policies, IP analysis sources, and more
- Manage protections per app or globally for all apps
This flexibility makes SafeLine suitable for both multi-tenant hosting setups and single high-traffic apps.
Attack Monitoring & Custom Rules
The Attacks tab is where you can geek out on logs.
You’ll see every blocked request, with reasons and originating IPs.
Need custom rules? No problem:
- Block specific payloads
- Restrict certain endpoints
- Whitelist trusted traffic
- Apply semantic analysis-based rules
Once set, SafeLine enforces them instantly, so malicious requests never hit your backend.
Anti-Flood & DoS Protection
DoS attacks are still a thing, and SafeLine bakes in a rate-limiting firewall.
You can set request limits per IP, effectively mitigating brute-force or flooding attempts without breaking normal traffic.
Instant Alerts via Telegram/Discord
One of my favorite quality-of-life features: real-time attack alerts.
Hook SafeLine up to Telegram or Discord, and you’ll get pinged the moment unusual activity spikes.
Great for on-call engineers who need to know now, not 12 hours later.
Final Thoughts
After extended testing, SafeLine WAF proves it’s not just another open-source project that looks good on GitHub but fails in production.
It delivers:
- Solid core protections against major OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities
- Intuitive, developer-friendly dashboards
- Real-time monitoring and alerts
- Easy deployment via Docker
For an open-source WAF, it feels surprisingly polished and battle-ready.
Join the SafeLine Community
If you continue to experience issues, feel free to contact SafeLine support for further assistance.
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