Fortinet FortiAnalyzer Reviews

The solution is used for grabbing logs. It is designed for log aggregation of all Fortigate firewalls and to give visibility of traffic and usage. 

The log events are quite useful for us. The events aggregation from various Fortigate products makes it very helpful.

Technical support is helpful.

The stability is excellent.

This is a highly scalable product.

The setup is straightforward. 

We'd like to see more embedded features.

We'd like to see more SIEM capabilities. I'd love to see this merged with FortiSIEM for example. 

I've been using the solution for around 20 years. 

The stability is great. I'd rate it ten out of ten for reliability. We rarely have any issues. 

You pay compared to the volume of logs you collect. It is very scalable. It's highly expandable. On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten. 

We have less than five network engineers using the product. 

I've dealt with support in the past and found them helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We use a variety of Fortigate products.

We did not use a different vendor previously. There is no other real option. We did try to use the free version of Splunk. We moved to Fortianalyzer as it works better in Fortinet products. Splunk is harder to fit into other Fortinet products. 

The installation process only takes a couple of hours. It is easy to install. 

The maintenance is very minimal. One person can handle maintenance tasks. 

We do use specialized consultants occasionally. However, I have been able to do it by myself as well in the past.

I cannot speak of the exact price. Someone else manages the contract. However, you do get good value for your money. It's not overly expensive. 

As it is on-premises, you do need some on-prem resources. You need a traditional hypervisor and need the ability to host the solution on your premises. 

We're customers and end-users. 

We are using the latest version of the solution typically. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. 

I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

We're a managed service provider and we use Fortinet FortiAnalyzer to generate reports for our customers. We manage our customer's Fortinet environment and FortiAnalyzer allows us to send a monthly report or on-demand report to our customers.

The solution does what it is supposed to. I want it to do reports for Fortinet and it does it well.

The FortiAnalyzer is not good at managing multi-version environments. If all your FortiGate are at different versions in the field, that's difficult. The one thing we didn't like is the fact you have to have 100% of your environment at the same release, which is not pleasant, to have it fully functional. You can have a different release, but to have it fully functional 100% of your environment has to be the same release.

In a future release, if they could turn they could turn Fortinet FortiAnalyzer into a multi-vendor supporting tool it would be awesome. However, I do not think this will happen.

I used Fortinet FortiAnalyzer for approximately two years.

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is scalable.

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is easy to scale. We have approximately 50-100 employees using this solution.

We have other log analyzers, but we have found with Fortinet FortiAnalyzerwhen you have a Fortinet environment, it's fully integrated. This was what we were looking for, we were not looking for multi-vendor solutions, we were looking for the best log analysis tool for Fortinet.

The solution is easy to set up.

We found the price of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer to be reasonable.

I would advise those wanting to use Fortinet FortiAnalyzer to use an MSP, to use a managed service provider, they can call us.

I rate Fortinet FortiAnalyzer an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for just one company for the analysis of the FortiGate switch.

The solution is scalable. 

The performance is good.

It's easy to set up the product. 

The solution costs too much. 

I've used the solution for about three years. 

The solution has been stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's a scalable product and expands well.

Only admins use the solution. There are three to four people with direct access to the product. 

I do not have access to technical support. In Iran, we have sanctions, and so we cannot get support. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult to manage. We can deploy it in about two hours. You only need one person to handle the deployment and maintenance tasks as it is very simple. 

We have witnessed a bit of an ROI and find the product to be worth the cost. 

We do need to pay for a license, and the payment is made yearly. There are no extra costs associated with the product beyond the main licensing fee. 

It is an expensive solution. 

We did not evaluate other solutions before choosing this product.

Overall, I'd rate the product eight out of ten in terms of its functionality. I have been pleased with its capabilities so far. I'd recommend the solution to others. 

The Primary case is to collect & monitor logs & events from all of our firewalls and appliances in one single interface with analysis

Our work has been more focused and efficient due to the automatic notifications and reports

You can monitor all appliances from a centralized location. 

You have a front dashboard for all our operations and all the logs. If you need to search for anything you can just dig deep into the logs.

For example, if you are searching for an email to find out why it is blocked, you will be able to see the policy that blocked it, which logs were triggered, etc... It gives you all the information you need right there, from the dashboard.

The solution offers excellent customizable reports. In our case, we needed a monthly report of all internet consumption, and we were able to easily create this.

There are pre-defined templates. The logs cover any question or need that we populate within these templates. However, you can also build your own template.

There is great analytics that can be used in different departments. For example, our marketing department can go more into media patterns and not just into browsing patterns.

Everything is easily visible and can be tracked and studied.

SOC is very helpful. It shows which IPs are targeting your environments. It shows you the threat levels of all the threats you're facing - including the locations, which policy was triggered et cetera. It will even tell you if the system blocked the threat or not.

FortiAnaylzer is compatible with all of our web browsers. 

There are customizable workflows that you can work with. You can automate certain tasks in FortiAnaylzer in the incidents and events sections. 

It is a pretty big software package. It has a lot of features which maybe aren't that useful. 

It's possible that they could add some advanced analytics and some proactive controls for logging analytics. That will help a lot.

The could be more automation and more artificial intelligence integrated into the solution.

It was a service model application originally. It needs to have some artificial intelligence in dealing with the analysis of the nodes, and not just showing the nodes. I'm one version behind the latest version, so I don't know if they added it yet, however, if they haven't it would be a good thing to put into their roadmap.

I've been using the solution for four years.

My solution is based on VM ova image which is predefined by Fortinet. I don't remember when was the last time I restarted the machine which shows no matter what is the size of logs collected the system doesn't crash.

The scalability is pretty good. It's only limited in the log size. You can buy five gigs or 10 gigs if you need to. It depends on how you're going to handle/store the logs.

That said, it is scalable since you are only billed with the size of logs you are using as per the packages and you don't need to modify the cpu/ram. I have it installed on a VM environment and it's connecting to data all over my sites that are both inside and outside Lebanon.

Technical support is perfect whether from the vendor or from the online support. I'm lucky to have a partner in Lebanon who is a preferred platinum partner with Fortinet. Whenever we open a case with them we always get a clear response. They are professional. We're quite satisfied with the level of support we are getting.

It is very straight forward, the only thing that you might do some customization in the report and the event management. Other than this everything is predefined and based on templates, so you are able to add your touch on the reports as well.

I have implemented it with a vendor who is the leader in our region working with Fortinet Solutions.

We're Fortinet end-users.

I was on older versions and now I'm with a newer version. People have faced many issues after downloading the latest update so I tend to keep one update back from the newest one to avoid issues.

I'd advise other potential users that, first of all, if they have Fortinet products in their environment, they should consider FortiAnaylzer. If they don't have it, they shouldn't consider it. They need to have Fortinet appliances.

Secondly, it is a very easy configuration, so companies will not have any problems configuring the FortiAnaylzer. It doesn't require a lot of resources.

We're going to bring a dedicated server for our FortiAnaylzer due to the fact that it is a bit of a predefined virtual machine that we can download from Fortinet's side. If you don't want to go deep in the reports and logs, it can rely on the built-in reporting tools in your appliances.

If you happen to have three Fortinet solutions in your environment then you need to have a FortiAnaylzer as it helps a lot in troubleshooting. It helps a lot with predicting everything that you might see happening on a lot on your network. You will need to have FortiAnaylzer due to the fact that the reporting is not that advanced in the appliances.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it was more automated and added in some AI elements, I would rate it higher.

We have the most data visibility with this solution.

The user interface could be a bit more user-friendly, and they could have more robust support. The support does not respond quickly. They should be able to solve the problems in one or two days, but sometimes it takes time. They constantly ask for logs, and it takes time.

We have been using this solution for three years, and we are using the latest version. It is deployed on-premises and cloud. It gets all the logs in a single platform because we have multiple sites.

The stability is good. I rate it an eight out of ten.

For cloud, the solution is always scalable. We have about ten customers using Fortinet FortiAnalyzer.

I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

The initial setup was not complex.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The normal use case for FortiAnalyzer is log review, log analysis, etc.

FortiAnalyzer makes it much easier for us to find an apparently compromised host on the network.

FortiAnalyzer has a robust ability to find a compromised host on your network, and when you identify a compromised host, you can address it.

Though FortiAnalyzer has improved over the last few versions, the user interface still has room for improvement. It's a bit dated-looking. I guess that's the nicest way to describe it. In FortiAnalyzer, I would like the ability to turn off some of the services. So, for example, FortiAnalyzer can take data from FortiCamera products and turn off the FortiCamera stuff to lighten the load on the box or turn off the FortiSock product.

I've been using FortiAnalyzer for about seven years.

FortiAnalyzer is really stable. It runs very well on its own and doesn't really need much TLC. It's a good product.

It's pretty scalable. The units that we have are the right size for the amount of stuff that we're running, but they do have products that scale up to handle significantly more Fortigate firewalls in log stuff than we do. I would say about 20 people use FortiAnalyzer. There's me, the security engineer, and the network engineering team, which uses it to look at stuff on the firewalls or check the firewall logs. And our information security group uses it to look at stuff that's going on with the firewalls as well as compromised hosts. It is being used pretty well as we get further down the path of deploying our FortiGate-managed endpoint product. There'll be more users and probably more use cases for it in the future.

I haven't really used a different solution previously. We've always used FortiAnalyzer in concert with Splunk.

FortiAnalyzer is a pretty straightforward product to deploy. It took half a day to deploy a pair of FortiAnalyzers and set them up in high availability mode. I deployed it by myself. These are hardware appliances, so there were a couple of devices that needed to be racked, powered, and configured.

I believe that these devices were procured with a five-year maintenance and support license up front. I work at a university, so the vendor provides a considerable higher ed discount.

It's all part of our Fortinet ecosystem, so we didn't really consider alternatives. I have a significant investment in FortiGate firewalls, so it just made sense to add FortiAnalyzer.

I rate FortiAnalyzer eight out of 10. It does an outstanding job of what it does. But the vendor doesn't necessarily live up to the hype, which is why it only got an eight out of 10. There's a lot of hype about the Fortinet security fabric. But for the large customers that buy their large firewalls and deploy them in infrastructure components, the Fortinet fabric does not work. If you are considering FortiAnalyzer, I suggest having a complete understanding of how your firewall infrastructure works in terms of what data you're going to and from it for analysis and what you're looking for in that analysis.

We use the on-prem deployment model of this solution.

My primary use case for this solution is for log collection. I have a lot of FortiGates that I have to collect logs from, so I primarily use it for log collection. We plan to deploy a SIEM and we want to try to see how to integrate all the solutions to our SIEM. We are processing for PCI data specifications. We have to respond to PCI requirements, so that's why we are making some changes and acquiring some new security solutions to deploy. Among them, we have FortiSIEM and other security solutions like antivirus.

It is a simple and solution. I can structuralize all my FortiGate logs but it's not so good from the administrative side. I have FortiGate in four countries and I am responsible for securing Fortinet. I also have to manage FortiGate in other countries, not just my own. If I have to go through each FortiGate it's going to be a little bit complicated. FortiAnalyzer is a good product; but, I keep thinking that FortiAnalyzer isn't really what I'm looking for which is why I am looking to acquire a SIEM solution. It will give me more log collection possibilities. 

I'm looking for something more efficient to analyze different foreign things. That's why FortiSIEM could compete with FortiAnalyzer. 

I haven't had to contact their technical support yet. 

The initial setup is not that complex. I didn't do the initial configuration, it was already set up, I'm only managing it right now. If we're talking about the integration side, like how to integrate FortiGate in FortiAnalyzer, I don't think it's complex. That's why they are known as one of the leaders in security.

I would recommend this solution to somebody considering it. 

The relevance of this solution will depend on the case. If you are considering this solution I would ask what you really intend to accomplish with it and what model you want. It's going to be based on the data you need to protect and analyze.

If I had to choose between FortiSIEM and FortiAnalyzer for log position it's better to go for SIEM. We all know that we can do a lot more with SIEM than just a log collection. Log collection is included in FortiSIEM; so, why acquire FortiAnalyzer is you can have FortiSIEM?

I would rate FortiAnalyzer a 6.5 out of ten. 

We are using Fortinet FortiAnalyzer for the managing surface for our customers. We are a service provider and we are focusing on providing a service to our customers.

The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is its performance.

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer could improve the user interface, and the experience of users receiving the reports and tracking could be better.

I have been using Fortinet FortiAnalyzer for approximately three years.

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is stable.

The support from Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is good.

The initial setup of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is fine. There is a lot of browsing and a lot of hierarchy that you need to have a particularly good understanding of in order to track the right things that you want to select.

There is a license needed to use this solution.

My advice to others is they have to assess well what kind of specific function or what kind of solution they are looking for.

I recommend this solution to others, but it depends on their usage.

I rate Fortinet FortiAnalyzer a seven out of ten.