Fortinet FortiSIEM Reviews

We have eight use cases installed, and we are collecting log sources from most of the relevant endpoints. We did all that configuration ourselves. So, the product didn't really have a lot to do with it.

It is deployed on a private cloud. We manage the cloud infrastructure ourselves, and its primary purpose is to monitor and protect our network devices and our own business systems, not necessarily our customer-facing services.

We are most probably on version 3. We are not on the current release.

The event correlation is pretty robust. The GUI is pretty good. 

Their technical support is horrible. By horrible, I mean a train wreck of a disaster that has fallen off a bridge and caught fire.

The out-of-the-box log ingestion for the supported devices is fine. The main issues arise when you're trying to ingest a log source that's not supported. You're left to figure it out yourself. You have to figure out the custom parsing yourself. There should be better support for nonstandard log sources. That's because unless you can ingest logs from all of your key controls, the solution will have gaps. Out of the box, this product doesn't support a lot of normal security devices that are common, and then you get into building custom parsers yourself to get it to work.

The other problem is infrastructure stability. The architecture scaling rules that the vendor provides are vastly understated. So, we constantly run into stability problems that we end up figuring out and solving by throwing more infrastructure at it because they're understating the infrastructure requirements. It is understandable that they would do that, and you see why they would do that, but it is causing no end of problems.

We've been using it for about three years.

Scaling is problematic because of the architecture. It is very hard to figure out the required compute, memory, and disk space because the documentation is so bad. Like any SIEM, it is very compute-heavy. So, scaling is always a problem. We've come to the conclusion that it is not scalable to the magnitude that we require.

I have two system administrators at the moment who are a part of my SOC. We have a very small operation. My SOC right now is comprised of two analysts, a senior analyst, and a manager. All of them are technical, and all of them are involved in managing this solution in one way, shape, or form.

We use the product as one of our internal controls. We have several others, which I won't get into, and we do not plan on scaling it beyond that. We have been piloting some customer-facing use cases, and we will be deprecating those, scaling them back, and moving them to the Microsoft product.

Their technical support is really bad. Their account support and product support are fine. I would rate their technical support one out of ten.

Negative

The initial deployment was done with the partner. Since then, we have done additional endpoints and upgrades, and we are doing all the work ourselves now. 

We used a partner to help us with the initial setup.

We are not really tracking ROI. We just view it as a cost of business, and we are not driving any revenue from it. So, it is just a sum cost.

This is probably more on the lower cost end of the spectrum compared to competing products.

Fortinet's license model is based on events per second, which makes sense, but that's not typical. It makes it very hard to calculate what your costs are going to be as you scale the platform because some log sources, such as firewall logs, are very noisy, and there are lots and lots of events per second, but some of them are not. So, it becomes a bit of a science experiment trying to guess what your costs are going to be as you scale the solution. This is where other competing products perhaps have a more straightforward license model.

In terms of additional costs, we also pay for our cloud infrastructure to run it. If your log source is not supported, you're going to have to develop custom parsing. So, you're going to incur that development cost. There is also the normal day-to-day administration cost.

We implemented Fortinet FortiSIEM for our own use, and then we have been exploring the idea of using it for a customer-facing or a managed service provider multi-tenant SIEM. We offer managed SIEM services to our customers, and we've come to the conclusion that it is not well suited for that purpose. We are in the process of installing Microsoft Sentinel and Azure Lighthouse for a new service.

My overall impression is that this is an SMB product. It is not a large-scale enterprise or multi-tenant product. Even though they tell you it'll do that, it is an SMB tool, and it is pretty good for that purpose. However, most institutions would not have the required in-house expertise for it. You need a dedicated, skilled technical administrator. You need your own DevOps team, which small and medium businesses generally don't have, or you can do what we did and use a partner to do the work for you.

I would caution others to fully understand the support model and talk to reference customers about it and have a solid understanding of what their internal resource needs will be to implement and support it. That's because it is complicated. Depending on the product you pick, you would need some in-house technical capabilities. For bigger companies, that's usually not a problem, but for small and medium businesses, that can be a problem.

I would rate it a six out of ten. It is suitable for its purpose. It is targeted at the SMB market. The feature function is fine. I would rate it higher if their technical support was better.