Fortinet FortiManager Reviews

We have 20 Forti Firewalls, including FortiManager. 

We use it for firewall management as we have many objects. In FortiManager, we use one type of object and implementation, the different firewalls.

The most valuable feature is having one object on all networks, which allows for implementation only once. We can have that object on one firewall or many, and we don't have to do everything one by one.

It's easy to set up the solution. 

Stability is good within the product.

It is scalable. 

Technical support is helpful and knowledgeable. 

The central management is great.

It's very transparent. If I  am troubleshooting for people who have a problem connecting to the network, then I can just open FortiManager and see all of the history of the connection. It makes it easy if I have to adjust a configuration.

The rules need to be more flexible. I prefer configuring rules and the VPN on the standalone device, not on the manager.

I've used the solution for three years. 

It's quite stable. It's reliable, and the performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have found the product to be scalable. It's not a problem if you want to expand it. 

For example, if you want to add another 10 or 15 firewalls, will it have any problems

We have technical support in my local language. The person who assists us is senior and he's a master of FortiManager. He knows many options for configurations.

Their technical support is very responsive. They are very knowledgeable.

Positive

It's easy to set up the product. It's an easy deployment. If I have a new box, we just have to create a template, and I add a new FortiGate to FortiManager, and implementation becomes only standard configuration via FortiManager. We do any password policy, proxy pack, and other features we implement, we do so through FortiManager. Other updates, for example, a hostname or object, is from FortiManager. However, if I create any specific rule on a specific VPN, we configure that on the device.

I'd rate the solution four out of five in terms of ease of implementation.

We bought FortiManager as an option as we bought maybe five firewalls plus a license to FortiManager. The implementation site gave me only one price, which included both solutions. It was basically a package. It's moderately priced. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability.

We had average security knowledge about management, and we started with a demo project. It was from Fortigate Support. They gave me two or three months free to try out FortiManager. I'd advise people to take the time to test it and see how it works. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Fortinet FortiManager can provide visibility for other Fortinet solutions across the company's environments, such as multiple branch offices. You are able to manage all these devices efficiently.

The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiManager is the ease of manageability and policy-pushing functionality.

Fortinet FortiManager could improve them by adding more portfolio components.

In a future release, it would be beneficial if Fortinet FortiManager could improve by adding more devices able to be managed the solution, including  switching, routing, and wireless,

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for approximately five years.

The stability is fine but could improve.

I rate the stability of Fortinet FortiManager an eight out of ten.

Fortinet FortiManager is a scalable solution.

I have a considerable number of clients who currently use FortiManager - at present, I can recall more than five. Since effective policy management and centralized upgrades are critical for multi-location management, FortiManager is an essential tool for such purposes. FortiManager is installed in the majority of my clients' locations.

The support of Fortinet FortiManager is good. 

Positive

The initial setup of Fortinet FortiManager is straightforward. We can push out the policies centrally. From a hardware or a component perspective, the implementation is simple.

The initial implementation can be completed in just a few days. However, over the course of a week or a week and a half, we could potentially refine and simplify the process. Nevertheless, it's an ongoing endeavor, as each organization's needs dictate the policies that must be established and maintained.

One person is enough for the deployment of the solution. However, it can depend on the environment. If there are a lot of modifications there might be a need for more people for the deployment. 

Fortinet FortiManager operates on a licensing system that is dependent on the number of devices being managed. Yearly subscription renewal is necessary to continue using the service. Although there is a cost associated with Fortinet FortiManager, its price is undoubtedly justified by the value it provides in terms of the purpose it serves.

Fortinet FortiManager is highly recommended as a crucial component of any comprehensive solution offered to clients. This is especially true for clients operating in multi-location and multi-branch environments, where individually managing, upgrading, and patching each location can be a significant burden. In such scenarios, Fortinet FortiManager can greatly alleviate these challenges and streamlines the management process.

I rate Fortinet FortiManager an eight out of ten.

Our client was at the start of a network automation journey. They were a multi-brand network environment and they started investing in the FortiManager to support their vision of network and security orchestration.

That was their first step in a series of steps to build up their security capabilities or at least to get better visibility on the security topics within their environment. With a different team, they also deployed the Nessus and Lansweeper in the same environment to do automated vulnerability sweeps. Before I left that customer, there were plans of deploying additional Fortinet products - FortiAnalyzer, for example. I left the customer team in February this year, so I'm not updated anymore on what's happening there. 

This was the first time for me to work with the FortiManager or a similar product. It was an interesting learning for me personally, to understand how we could do centralized management of these firewalls. At the same time, while we were deploying the solution, I considered how useful it would be in collaboration with other Fortinet products, for example, the Analyzer, and the FortiSIEM, to really get automated security responses. That's what the vision was.

To have a quicker response to security events, the customer wanted to eventually acquire the capabilities to do automated security responses, just to make it faster to respond to security events. Even without the security orchestration, just the fact that the customer could request the firewall team to configure a job that would roll out a configuration on the firewalls and it could be deployed across all the firewalls through the FortiManager. That was a big improvement compared to deploying the new firewall rule on each firewall sequentially. So being able to roll it out to all the firewalls in the same change, was a big improvement in terms of being able to respond more quickly to any security events.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Within the management of some features on FortiManager, specifically the management of user objects used for VPN service, FortiManager is quite weak. This was the case as of the time when we deployed them, which was one software cycle ago. I don't know whether that deficiency was fixed, however, we found it was easier to make changes to the VPN user objects, and local user objects. It was much easier to make the changes directly on the firewall than with FortiManager because in FortiManager you have to go through different windows, and even the CLI, in order to make the changes to the user database. It's just a matter of improving the UI, being able to manipulate objects that could be manipulated using the firewall GUI for example. It's just about expanding the features of the product so that whatever you can do on the firewall, you can also do it at the same level of convenience on the FortiManager.

I used the solution for a while. I used it just last year. The project ended in February this year, so it has been several months now since I last touched FortiManager.

The solution was stable. I left that customer last February, so I don't know how it is now. At the point I left, it was stable. 

With regards to scalability, with the on-prem solution, I would say it won't be as scalable as a more virtual solution, either on the cloud or on-prem. With virtualized environments, you can scale easily. With appliances, you do have hard limits in terms of capabilities. Once the number of devices exceeds the limits of the product, then you have no choice but to upgrade to a higher model of FortiManager.

We have two clients who use FortiManager in their environment.

The overall support was okay. We only had issues really when we raised several tickets to help solve the synchronization of the user objects, I felt it took much longer than it should have. It took several weeks before we finally definitively were told it won't work and this is what we need to do. Therefore, it took much longer than I felt it should have taken. For other topics that we raised during the deployment, they were quite helpful, however.

I helped the project team in implementing it. It was the first time that we implemented FortiManager.

The initial setup was straightforward. If you wanted just to do the basic configuration, it's quite straightforward.  

That said, it was straightforward except we had some big issues, and big challenges in our first attempt to put all the devices in the same ADOM as each device had a fair amount of custom firewall rules and custom firewall objects already existing, and each firewall at the branch site was also acting as a local VPN hub. 

We had a lot of local user objects and we discovered quite quickly that when we had a lot of user objects for the same user, but on different firewalls, when we wanted to put them into the same ADOM, it created a huge challenge in synchronizing user objects because these user objects on different firewalls are considered to be different user objects owned by the same physical person. They had the same username and the same authentication credentials, so it created an issue in synchronization.

Eventually, after consulting with Fortinet, we had to redo our design. That was the only hiccup we had in the design during implementation. Had we known about this requirement, had we understood that particular technical constraint earlier, our design from the beginning would have been much different.

The deployment itself took four months. 

We had two technical people who set up the solution, however, neither were full-time. You only really need one full-time person.

The licenses that we purchased as part of the project were for three years. I don't remember the price anymore. I can't recall the monthly license fee. In any case, the licenses were purchased for three-year periods.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

FortiManager is software that enables you to manage the solution from a central point. For instance, we had 50 sites and were able to manage all the sites from a central management console. This solution is deployed on-premises. My company was using version 7.

There were 5,000 people using this solution in my company.

We had a security policy that was deployed on all the devices, and we managed it from only one place. We didn't have to manage it on each piece of equipment. Second, regarding the configuration of SD-WAN, we could build configuration templates on FortiManager and push the templates from FortiManager to the different Fortigate units.

This solution enables you to centralize the rules and the configuration of all the equipment.

One of the biggest limitations is the grammar of the API – not the API itself. It was not very well done.

The CLI could be enhanced.

Stability was good.

Scalability was very good.

Technical support was excellent. We bought the optional support, so we paid an additional fee.

We had dedicated support just for us. We had one person who was really good and helped us design the solution. We had a very good design, so the deployment was good afterward.

Setup is of medium difficulty. It's not that complicated, but it's not easy. On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate it a 3. It's not a simple plug and play, but it's not that difficult either.

For the design and deployment, we used four people. For maintenance, we only needed one part-time engineer per year.

We used an external company to run the deployment, and it took us three months to finish the design of the solution and three months to deploy all the boxes and all sites.

We had some people who were helping us deploy because there were several sites all over the country, so there were some people who were going on-site.

For the licensing fee, we paid around 10,000 to 15,000 euros. 

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

My advice is to know your product before you start using it.

Fortinet FortiManager is a great solution that helps you consolidate the single point of management for all Fortinet solutions. It also helps you support the change management process that is aligned with ITIL. The solution also helps you to have version control and tracking control.

The solution's most valuable feature is the consolidation and the single point of administration solution.

The graphics interface between Fortinet FortiManager and any Forti products should be standardized. Doing a configuration change directly in the UTM is not the same as doing it via FortiManager for some features.

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for five years.

Fortinet FortiManager is a very stable solution.

I rate the solution's stability ten out of ten.

The solution's scalability is very good.

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten.

I would prefer the person who helps us on the first call or interaction to have a higher engineering capacity.

Positive

The solution's initial setup wasn't done by me but by an expert. I believe the setup is not too simple because it took some implementation by an expert.

As a simplified, unified point of management, Fortinet FortiManager helps to reduce administration costs.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.

I haven't implemented the solution's automation capabilities. The most automation I have done in Fortinet FortiManager is a configuration to be deployed massively to a group of UTMs, access points, or switches. I would recommend the solution to other users. It would be great to have FortiManager by your side if everything you have is from Fortinet.

As the platform tracks every change we make, it helps me with compliance and also helps me maintain all the devices at the same firmware level. It helps with compliance and auditing.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our solution centralizes all the firewalls in different regions or data centers into one location. We manage policy distribution between various regions by creating policies and deploying them according to the device location where the policy is needed. 

We also distribute certificates remotely for managers. Our solution primarily works with FortiGate firewalls without integrating with third-party products.

The centralized management of policies and certificates, coupled with the capability to handle multi-site deployments effectively, provides streamlined operations. 

Centralized visibility enhances security management, offering unified management across regions such as India, Singapore, and Australia. FortiManager captures all devices and provides reports for security analysis. 

We consider the pricing reasonable as it reduces operational costs and boosts security efficiency.

The graphical user interface could use improvement as it appears complex and not user-friendly. Better integration of Fortinet ADC into FortiManager would be beneficial.

We have been working with FortiManager for more than five to ten years.

Palo Alto Panorama is difficult to configure compared to FortiManager, which is more feasible and easier to manage.

Initially, the deployment takes some time, but it is easy to accomplish. Some challenges we encountered include the NTP server, certificate management, and port openings across regions.

We initially deploy our own NTP server. If that does not work, we resort to manual timing settings.

Pricing is reasonable and does not pose challenges.

FortiManager is more user-friendly compared to Palo Alto Panorama. It is suitable for small-scale and easy management. 

I would rate the overall solution between seven out of ten. Better integration of other Fortinet products like ADC into FortiManager would be beneficial.

We are using a virtual machine for the FortiManager. It's already installed, and we just collected the seven units under the FortiManager. So we don't need to access each device separately. It collects all the FortiGate units in one console. We see the statistics and the status for all machines from the FortiManager. It is easy to control and monitor all the remote devices.

The main benefit of Fortinet FortiManager is the ability to control all the devices from a central location, view their statuses, and manage their configurations and updates from a single management console. 

The price may only be applicable for bigger companies, and there is room for improvement in the FortiManager in license models. In general, the SIM license can be a bit complicated. You have to order licenses for different endpoints and devices, and calculating the costs can be confusing. Simplifying the ordering process for the SIM license would be helpful.

We have been using the SD-WAN solution for almost a year now. It was implemented in 2021. For Fortinet FortiManager, it's been less than a year since we connected after the implementation of the SD-WAN. It's on-premise but as a virtual machine.

We are using the latest version of Fortinet FortiManager because we updated it before and after the installation.

It is a stable solution.

We ordered the product from a local company, which also provided the installation service for the firewall and SD one. We have not yet utilized the Fortinet technical support services.

The initial setup is easy. We did it without any training.

I deployed the solution myself. When I installed it, I made sure that I installed the latest version of FortiManager, and then I added the devices one by one. I provided the credentials for each device, and the information was automatically synchronized with the remote devices. So, I did it one by one. It is installed in the VM environment, so it is not difficult to maintain it.

As we are an oil company, the price was manageable for us because we had a budget for it. But for small businesses, it could be costly.

We use SolarWinds for scenarios like network performance monitoring, configuration management, and IP address management. And for the FortiGate firewalls, we are using Fortinet FortiManager.

We have different modules for SolarWinds, but for FortiGate firewalls, we use FortiManager.

Overall, I will rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best because the dashboard could use some improvement.

We use Fortinet FortiManager to create different policies and much more. We used to create a lot of VPNs, and we used to perform the cleanup of firewalls because of security orders with FortiManagemer. We created standard policies for multiple devices. For example, we have more than four hundred or five hundred devices, and a standard policy needs to be created. We have to create the policy and deploy it, and we can also clean up the firewall rule.

I like the rapid deployment feature. I also like that it's easy to troubleshoot.  FortiManager is amazing because we can have a centralized policy. All our devices are integrated, and we can also engage in troubleshooting. We can use it for different deployments. One fantastic feature is the ability to create a version and deploy it immediately.

It would be better if it were easier to run a routing protocol. In the next release, I would like them to enhance some features in the GUI rather than CLI or OSP. For example, whenever a customer generates an ISP directly on the firewall, it's complicated to configure the routing protocol. 

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for about four years.

Fortinet FortiManager is a stable product.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a ten.

Fortinet FortiManager is a scalable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability a nine.

Technical support was amazing.

Positive

We used Palo Alto before. Most of our customers are running Cisco EAC and would like to block some websites. But next-generation features aren't available. So we have to use a FortiGate tool. Considering the costs and the fact that it's easy to deploy, it was the better solution. And most importantly, VPN is free. We don't need to buy a VPN license to configure it.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We implemented this solution. You need two people to implement this solution. A security architect and an engineer are enough.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Fortinet FortiManager a nine.