Fortinet FortiADC Reviews

We use the product to manage load balancing and HTTP traffic. 

I am impressed with the product's load-balancing feature. 

The solution should improve finding false positives and false negatives. There are a lot of false positives. 

The product's setup is straightforward. The WAF took more time because we had to find a configuration that avoided a lot of false positives. We required only two people to handle the tool's deployment. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. 

I use Fortinet ADC solution for SSL offloading, certificate management, and load balancing.

The solution enhances performance by efficiently balancing the load across multiple backend servers. It ensures client experiences remain unaffected even if a server starts or encounters issues. Additionally, it manages SSL offloading, relieving our servers from handling certificates.

One of the product's areas of improvement includes reducing the number of components requiring additional licenses, such as antivirus and IDS, which are already covered by our firewall. These additional licenses are redundant for our needs.

The platform has been very stable for the past five years, requiring no maintenance from anyone. There have been no hardware or software issues.

The solution supports numerous virtual servers, approximately a hundred.

I have relied on documentation and online resources for troubleshooting. Our support license is valid for two more years.

Before implementing Fortinet ADC, we used an application delivery system from a company acquired by Broadcom. Due to its discontinuation, we could not upgrade this system, preventing firmware updates necessary for new certificates.

The previous solution required extensive command-line configuration, while the Fortinet ADC offers a more user-friendly web interface with various configuration options, simplifying the setup process.

I carefully reviewed the documentation and configured the product, avoiding default settings. While the setup was complex, thorough preparation facilitated a smooth deployment. It took approximately a year to complete it.

The return on investment is moderate.

Our basic license excludes features such as antivirus and IDS. Due to license limitations, some functionalities are not configured.

I evaluated another platform but found it a single-device system lacking fault tolerance. It was also more expensive and did not perform as effectively, so I chose Fortinet ADC.

The product's advanced capability improves network efficiency and performance by concurrently managing thousands of client connections and optimizing overall network traffic.

I recommend it to others and rate it a seven out of ten. It performs very well for the functions it provides.

We use FortiADC for link load balancing. FortiGate has this feature, but some customers aren't using Fortinet firewalls. In this case, the customer had three Internet links for downloading huge satellite images that are more than 70 GB. 

This company collects the images so their software can analyze which crops are at risk. They download the images between the hours of noon and midnight, and their customers access the website early in the morning around 7 a.m. They need to have the images downloaded and analyzed by the time their customers wake up, but the download server only allows 10 connections per IP address. We set up three links to achieve 30 connections to that IP server, and FortiADC balances the load between those links. 

Although FortiADC has multiple features that I like, the global DNS is the most helpful. It is primarily useful for customers with huge environments and at least two data centers. FortiADC can act as your DNS server. It can check which data center has the lowest latency, and route traffic to that one. It's an intelligent DNS.

It can also balance application loads between servers and reroute content. If a public IP address hosts multiple applications, ADC can steer the traffic to the specific server of that application based on the URL that you are calling. If you have servers that respond for one specific application, you can use the ADC to load-balance the sessions between those servers. Which server has the least number of sessions? Which server is responding the fastest? 

I believe FortiADC will be discontinued soon because many of its features are now available on other Fortinet devices. We don't use it much anymore except for specific use cases that require the global DNS feature. Link load balancing and SD-WAN are now built into FortiGate, but the web application firewall policies could be improved. 

I started working with FortiADC in 2015, so it has been around eight years. 

I rate FortiADC seven out of 10 for stability.

I rate FortiADC seven out of 10 for scalability.

I had a terrible experience with Fortinet support. I only used support once when I bought the solution. I got no response for two days. However, I believe that it's no longer the case. Fortinet solutions have problems when they're launched. For example, we had issues with Fortinet's authenticator when it came out. We also had trouble with FortiNAC in the beginning. 

I rate Fortinet FortiADC nine out of 10. In every instance where we deployed FortiADC, our customers were only looking for a specific feature. My advice to those considering FortiADC is to understand all the features because customers are often unaware of what it can do. Our customers typically want either the server balancing or global DNS features, and they are not aware of the other things they can do with the solution. 

We mainly use FortiADC for load balancing the application traffic for our customers. The aim is for the traffic to be equally balanced between servers, whether there are two, 10 or 20 servers. There are different load balancing algorithms that we have on the FortiADC and based on that we configure and we load balance the traffic. We have a static website, so we can use FortiWeb instead of the connection coming from the client each time. FortiADC gets the request from the cache Instead of it being sent to the server. If we have different ISP links, then we do our link load balancing using FortiADC. I'm a senior cyber security engineer and we are distributors of FortiADC.

There are a lot of benefits to the customer using this solution. Because FortiADC helps in load balancing traffic, at peak times the logs get sent to FortiAnalyzer where they have an automated SOAR, security orchestration and automation for the incident response. Whenever it detects an attack, it will automatically trigger an alert on the service ticket and send it to the appropriate team. That's the benefit of this solution to the company. 

The most valuable features would be content caching and content compression. It also has an inbuilt firewall. I doubt whether any other ADC supports this firewall feature. It also has a web application firewall feature.

Any issues with this solution seem to be connected to technical support. They need to respond more quickly, providing a one or two day response time is not adequate. In addition, the company hasn't provided good technical documentation. It requires step by step procedures on how to configure some of the features on the FortiADC. They should come up with good KB articles and information related to the workings of the product. Fortinet specifies that the solution can be used for 1,000 clients, but actually we've found that you can't go above 400 for content compression and rewriting. If you go above 400, the solution becomes unresponsive. 

I've been using this solution for about five years. 

It's a reliable solution but I think F5 is better as a load balancer. We sometimes get bugs but Fortinet has a specialized bug team that can create a patch within a specified period of time, two weeks or maybe within a month and the issue will be rectified. The solution needs maintenance each time they release a new firmware. The stability needs to be tested and we need to check whatever we are running, and make sure there are no critical bugs.

The solution is scalable up to a point. If you're expanding your company and have a lot of customers, say 2,000, you need to go for a higher end model. Otherwise you'll have problems if you're using the hardware model. With the cloud and with the VM, you can always scale to your requirements. We have 400 users. We implement the solution and if customers want to use our website and database servers, the client traffic will hit the ADC and it will load balance to all the servers. If the company decides to expand, then we might need to scale FortiADC. 

Technical support has a policy that only a priority one ticket will be given priority. Without that, there can be a significant delay in getting a response from technical support. It's not good enough. 

I've had minimal experience with F5 which has more features and I think most people would go for F5. In cases where customers are using other Fortinet products they will prefer to go with FortiADC because of the SOAR feature on the FortiAnalyzer and automatic incident response on other things. 

The initial setup is straightforward. You bring up FortiADC and you configure the interfaces, then you configure the load balancing profiles. That's it. I carry out the deployment myself and it generally takes a week or two. Deployment time is based on the customer configuration, load balancing profiles, but it generally takes a maximum of two weeks. 

The deployment plan is to get the topology of the customer. Once that is complete, we create this HLD and LLD and also the solution diagram. Those are the main things that we do before deployment. Once we have the HLD, LLD reports, then we implement within the customer environment and we test if everything works, and if everything is good it gets put into production. 

The main reason a client wants this load balancer is because there is a load on the web server and one of them becomes unresponsible and that means a big loss for the company. It's the main reason they purchase FortiADC. Once they implement this solution there are no issues with the load server. 

From a pricing perspective, I believe FortiADC is cheaper than the F5 and also cheaper than some of the well established load balancers. There is a subscription fee but I'm not sure of the exact cost.

I would recommend using FortiADC, they seem to be coming up with some new features. They have a lot of patents compared to other security companies. They're coming up with new machine learnings and other features. The solution provides an overall good experience. 

I would currently rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use Fortinet FortiADC as a resource proxy and load balancer.

The product has flexible and interesting licensing options. If you buy a low-end licensing plan, you get all the features with a lower version. You can buy an expensive version if you need advanced features, including security, web application firewall, etc.

The product’s price could be reduced. Also, some of its features need to be more advanced.

We have been using Fortinet FortiADC for a few months.

It is a stable platform.

It is a scalable product.

The technical support services are quite good.

The initial setup process is easy for me as I have experience working with FortiGate. It requires half a day to complete.

The product has average pricing. I rate its pricing a five out of ten.

I rate Fortinet FortiADC a nine out of ten.

We load segregated data from the web application firewalls and have an alternative load balancer for both our internal and external applications. There are some extensive rewrites that we need. This load is used across our geographically dispersed locations, and data centers, that are actually facilitating both regions.

The ease of use is because of the functionality across these devices currently in the market. Most of the features are the same that they are offering with the certificate, be it the offloading options, load-balancing features, which is a provision, and a set of rules that you can implement. That has been kind of a common standard, of course, depending on the money and the grade of the device. Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running needs minimal knowledge is another reason. 

I would say in terms of their basic selling point was always everything built into one, even if you take their Fortigate firewalls, FortiWeb Application Firewall, be it FortiADC, they do push many features into one. And even the smallest version or the model of the device still gives you extensive features, but that comes at the cost of CPU and memory, which makes it hard. Even before you start to use extensive features, you start already seeing the CPU and memory be used to capacity. So at some point, I feel like there is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle. If they can provide much more flexibility in designing it, that would be great because of the number of options it provides either fixed set as of now but given some open sources do more options, open source software, so configured on Linux and Freebase, they offer more than this. 

I have been working with Fortinet FortiADC for the past four years now.

When it comes to stability the issues are minimal. However, whenever we faced an issue, it was a major issue. So it does work well in normal mode, but when it has a problem, then it can be a very difficult situation.

With the scalability option on the cloud, you can have that easily. 

When I have worked with technical support on many occasions they do offer proper assistance in a timely manner, but their initial processing in the Fortinet support structure is more of a challenge. Depending on the educational level of the technical support depends on the speed of how your support ticket is handled and could take longer to diagnose.

Neutral

The initial plan was to have FI as a global load balancer, but given the cost factor, we switched to FortiADC.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. You work with some network interfaces through configuration, plug it in, and have a default rule in place, and it still runs. It does the job on its own.

We could manage it internally, as I mentioned, the ease of use and how easy you can deploy, it was still better, but I could not say the same for other devices. I have seen where you definitely need either an expert or vendor support to have those rules configured on other deployments. We do not have that kind of dependency with Fortinet or FortiADC products.

You definitely need a support license. If it is critical web application firewalls and they have hundreds and thousands of customers, then I would say FortiADC higher models would definitely support it well.

I would rate Fortinet FortiADC an eight out of ten.

Our customers use Fortinet FortiADC for load balancing multiple applications on databases, web servers, etc.

Fortinet FortiADC is the most affordable appliance you can purchase from any vendor. From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet.

The product's stability for VMs could be better.

We have been using Fortinet FortiADC for two years.

The product is stable in terms of hardware.

The product has good scalability.

I have logged many technical cases with the product's support team. They provide me with professional service. 

Fortinet FortiADC's initial setup is easy. The deployment process involves gathering customer information about routing and network design. The time taken for the implementation depends on the number of virtual servers or applications. In many cases, it takes three days to complete the setup. It is easy to maintain due to the powerful view of logs.

The product has affordable pricing.

F5 Advanced WAF is more stable and granular and has the latest updates compared to Fortinet FortiADC. Although both the hardware has Layer 7 load balancing method.

If you are running a small or medium-sized enterprise, I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. I rate it a five out of ten.

It's used for load-balancing traffic and DNS traffic as well. We use FortiADC as the global traffic manager and DNS solution and also as a classic load application delivery controller.

We use it to load balance between applications.

It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5.

Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale. Maybe some new features could be added to address these issues.

Another area of improvement is support. So the only problems are with support, and scaling can be a bit difficult. I

It's been five years now. Currently, it's version 6.4.

It is a stable solution.  We haven't faced any problems with stability, so let's say it's an eight out of ten.

It's scalable. We can add more ADCs to the cluster if needed.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. Because if we miss the appliance's sizing in the beginning, it will be hard to scale.

Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses. We didn't deploy the big appliances.

The support is bad. Unfortunately, they are very late in responding to our requests. It takes too much time.

Negative

The initial setup is easy to install. The process is straightforward.

The deployment takes around two to three days, considering the installation and configuration of some applications. We can easily configure the profiles.

Usually, two people from my team, two engineers, work on the product. Moreover, customers usually request maintenance. So, one person is involved in the maintenance process.

I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs. You just pay for the license and, if applicable, for the hardware appliance. If it's a VM, there is no additional cost for the license.

It's up to the customer to choose a licensing model. If you choose to buy yearly, it's usually on a yearly basis.

You can go ahead and buy this product. It's very good, pretty stable, and the price is fair, as I mentioned. So, in terms of competition, it's a good product.

Overall, I would rate it as an eight.