Fortinet FortiManager Reviews

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.

We use it to manage the FortiGate and install it on several sites. You can see the lock, and if there is a problem inside the network, the FortiGate sends a warning to the Fortinet FortiManager. It allows you to check and know what the problem is. If we use the Fortinet FortiManager to replicate the configuration and want to install ten FortiGate on ten sites, you don't have to set configuration on all ten. You can configure one FortiGate and the Fortinet FortiManager to replicate the configuration on all orders of FortiGate. You can manage the bandwidth and decide to set it. For example, the IT team can use two megabytes, and the commercial team can use one gigabyte. In addition, you can configure it at your ease.

You cannot integrate with other solutions, so they should allow integration with Cisco and Juniper. It'd be great if we could log into other provider equipment on Fortinet FortiManager.

We have been using this solution for five years. It is deployed on cloud. We are satisfied with Fortinet FortiManager because it's a very interesting solution.

It is stable but also depends on the type of internet connection that you have. If your internet connection is stable, the Fortinet FortiManager allows different sites to be easily accessible.

It is a scalable solution. Our customers are big enterprises and corporate clients.

When you have some problem, they are always available to help.

The initial setup is easy compared to Cisco Solutions because you just have to click when configuring. Whereas with Cisco, you have to set CMI commands.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. I do not have specific details about the licensing costs. Compared to competitors like Panorama, Fortinet FortiManager is cheaper.

Companies are interested in this solution. We help about five clients install the solution on their sites.

We primarily use the solution for managing firewalls. 

We enjoy the centralization of all roles and objects and so on.

As a manager, you can manage 50 or 40 firewalls with only one product.

The initial setup is easy.

It is stable. 

The solution should be more open to other products. FortiManager must be able to manage other products from other vendors. While it's perfect for other Forti products, it's not ideal for everything.

This is not available to work with many other vendors in the cloud. In the end, you want only one view of your own security view of everything, which is impossible with FortiManager.

Of course, this is the case with Palo Alto as well.

I've been using the solution for seven or eight years. 

It is a stable, reliable product. The solution has good performance. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. 

The product is likely scalable, however, we haven't pushed it. 

We have no experience with many numbers, such as 200 or 600 devices. We scale up to 60 firewalls. 

Forti support is quite good.

We work with Fortinet and Palo Alto.

The initial setup was not complex. However, we did the initial setup seven years ago.

We are Fortinet partners at this moment.

I'm not sure of the exact version we are on. I'm more on the sales side. 

We manage from Spain many firewalls around the world, and at this moment, it's very necessary to have FortiManager. It's just too bad we can't manage other vendors. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher if it offered more outside-brand integrations. 

In our use case, we manage the configuration of all the firewalls so we can create different versions. We are able to do a centralized deployment and if any changes are there, we can map them with the authorization policies. If somebody makes a mistake with the configuration we can revert back to the old configuration. With Fortinet FortiManager, we can manage multiple firewalls and devices from a central point.

When we have a specific configuration pushed it does take some time to be deployed on the actual firewall. There might be some bugs or issues in that particular case. Sometimes we need to, if it is in a cluster mode, reboot the firewall. If the configuration does not go properly we have to reboot. These are small changes that will make things seamless. 

When upgrades are deployed, Fortinet FortiManager should identify if a specific device is not matching with other devices. I think it is there, but then in the perspective of alerts and logs, the uneven configuration is there. It should be today's alert. For example, disaster recovery site, there is a firewall. If someone changes it in the primary production area and then they forget to change it in their area, there should be an alert.

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for the past four years.

It is stable. If Fortinet FortiManager goes down, then accessing an individual firewall is a different process altogether. Obviously, security devices are there, so basically those security points are available. I don't know if a cloud-based Fortinet FortiManager is available right now. But then on-premise, we have to take care of the devices, and the availability of those devices.

It is scalable and there is no issue. You can have available devices and you can scale. The only thing is you need to do capacity planning. How many firewalls are there and the model of Fortinet FortiManager has to be decided? If you do this properly, then there is no issue. 

Technical support is great. When we have sent urgent tickets and they do reply back within fifteen minutes.

Positive

We have Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, and WatchGuard. We also work with Juniper.

For people who are not used to operating it, it is a little complex. 

Fortinet Fortimanger is not costly. They have high-end devices and the portfolio is big. Basically, they have a portfolio for all the aspects of security. From that perspective, they are good.

The price point is very good.

I would 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.

I am a systems integrator and work with customers to integrate the solution. 

The solution has the best stability for application control and inspections. 

The fabric for integrations or connections could be improved. This would make a big difference for some customers. 

I have been using the solution for more than five years. 

The solution is very scalable so I rate scalability a ten out of ten. 

Support has an overall lack of knowledge. We have opened many tickets for support but they don't even answer them. 

Pricing could improve a little bit so I rate it a seven out of ten. 

It is important to select the features you need at the outset. Some customers don't do this correctly so their hardware doesn't perform as well. Take into account the applications you want to run on the solution when selecting features. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use Fortinet FortiManager for centralized management of our Fortinet devices, including switches and firewalls. This single console allows us to manage multiple devices efficiently.

We can push device configurations and policy management through FortiManager.

It has improved our security operations.

FortiManager has automation capabilities that positively impact our operational efficiency.

The most valuable feature is the centralized management console.

Configuring Fortinet without internet access is challenging.

I am currently in the process of integrating Fortinet FortiManager.

Fortinet FortiManager is scalable but scaling is costly.

I am satisfied with the technical support.

Positive

I can complete the deployment myself.

It can be expensive. Some competing solutions in the market, like Sophos and SonicWALL, offer lower costs of up to 40 percent.

I would rate Fortinet FortiManager 8 out of 10.

I recommend it but be aware that Fortinet firewalls managed by FortiManager may require weekly updates due to known bugs on the Fortinet servers.

FortiManager is used just to manage a lot of devices from Fortinet, especially FortiGate. We can push the configuration, we can push the packages, and we can change the configuration from the FortiManager via centralized management.

There are a lot of features that are important to us. For example, we like that we can roll back to the previous configuration, or push configuration on devices remotely. We also have the ability to save the configuration on FortiManager. If there is an issue with the devices, we can report the configuration remotely.

It's a very rich, robust product.

The integration is quite good.

Its pricing is decent. 

This solution is easy to set up.

The solution is able to scale quite well. 

We are not missing any features at this time. I don't have any expectations about additional features.

The storage could be better for logs. There is a degradation of performance if we activate logs on FortiManager.

I've been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. We haven't faced any performance issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's scalable. It's easy to expand. 

The solution is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex to implement. 

The pricing is reasonable. It varies. Sometimes we need to buy many appliances and sometimes just a few. 

There are some additional costs sometimes from our partner. It depends on the size of the environment of our clients. We can negotiate on and maybe lower the price if a lot of devices are needed. 

We are a VMware vendor. We work with a local partner. We are a kind of integrator.

With respect to the requirements, new users should consider performance and be sure to tune the solution correctly during the configuration and integration. It will ensure it works well once it is up and running.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.