Fortinet FortiAnalyzer and Amazon CloudWatch are both competitors in the network activity monitoring and management sector. FortiAnalyzer seems to have the upper hand in advanced reporting capabilities, while CloudWatch excels in AWS integration and ease of use.
Features: Fortinet FortiAnalyzer offers comprehensive reporting, log management, and visibility into network activities, supporting next-gen firewall analytics, real-time threat analysis, and customizable reports. Its integration with Fortinet products allows centralized management. Amazon CloudWatch provides robust monitoring and management for AWS environments, collecting and analyzing performance and operational data in real-time. It supports alarms, dashboards, and logs, integrated seamlessly with AWS services.
Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiAnalyzer could enhance its real-time log monitoring, improve report customization, and address interface issues. It lacks integration with non-Fortinet products and could benefit from more responsive technical support. Amazon CloudWatch might improve its dashboard visualization and user interface. While it integrates well with AWS, its limited application performance monitoring and reporting capabilities could be enhanced. Better cost management options are needed due to its expensive scaling potential.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is mainly deployed on-premises or in a hybrid cloud, offering flexibility but potentially complicating deployment compared to cloud-native options. Users report mixed experiences with technical support. Amazon CloudWatch, primarily a public cloud solution, offers seamless AWS integration but may require adjustments for hybrid environments. Its customer service is generally reliable, albeit less personalized.
Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiAnalyzer's competitive pricing favors those invested in Fortinet products, with costs varying by log storage and network size. It is considered cost-effective for mid-sized enterprises despite complex licensing models. Amazon CloudWatch's pay-as-you-go model suits dynamic environments but can lead to high charges with increased data volumes, requiring careful cost management. Its pricing enhances ROI for AWS customers.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
The impact of the tool is low when the functionalities are inaccessible due to resource consumption.
Fortinet is highly efficient for moderate deployments and provides a secure platform for medium-sized networks and data centers.
I have seen a return on investment with Fortinet FortiAnalyzer due to its competitive pricing and straightforward licensing model based on the amount of log data processed per day.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
Customer service and support for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer are quite helpful and responsive.
Technical support is good, and I rate it ten out of ten.
The support service is very slow and incompetent.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is scalable, especially for the VM versions, as additional space can be provisioned from the servers as needed.
FortiAnalyzer is a scalable product.
It typically handles three to five years of expansion effectively.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
We faced some CPU consumption issues, which caused the machine to slow down and required a restart of FortiAnalyzer.
It remains stable during implementation for one or two years.
It provides a reliable solution for managing network-wide data.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
When licensing, each device is licensed separately, such as the firewall, which can become expensive.
This would help in analyzing various security incidents and events more effectively by delivering a handful of relevant logs instead of thousands.
Enhanced deep inspection features would make troubleshooting easier.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
Its licensing model is based on the amount of log data processed per day, making it more cost-effective compared to QRadar, which is EPS and device-based.
In terms of pricing, FortiAnalyzer is not expensive.
In the Indian market, Fortinet's pricing is very competitive, allowing us to win most of our deals.
Amazon CloudWatch allows me to set up and view even historical logs, which is one of the features I find valuable.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
The advanced analytics capabilities aid in threat detection by providing visibility into indicators of compromise.
The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is its ability to simplify and display logs clearly, providing details like which IPs are accessing the system, the destination, and the policies applied.
The log management is useful as we have connected around two hundred eighty-five walls and around fifteen to twenty plus firewalls with Fortinet FortiAnalyzer, making it highly beneficial compared to logging into each individual firewall.
Amazon CloudWatch is used for monitoring, tracking logs, and organizing metrics across AWS services. It detects anomalies, sets dynamic alarms, and automates actions to optimize cloud utilization, troubleshoot, and ensure service availability.
Organizations leverage Amazon CloudWatch for collecting and analyzing logs, triggering alerts, and profiling application performance. It's also employed for monitoring bandwidth, virtual machines, Lambda functions, and Kubernetes clusters. Valuable features include seamless integration with AWS, real-time data and alerts, detailed metrics, and a user-friendly interface. It provides robust monitoring capabilities for infrastructure and application performance, log aggregation, and analytics. Users appreciate its scalability, ease of setup, and affordability. Additional key aspects are the ability to create alarms, dashboards, and automated responses, along with detailed insights into system and application health. Room for improvement includes dashboards and UI enhancements for better visualization and customizability, log streaming speed, advanced machine learning and reporting capabilities, pricing, and integration with non-AWS services and databases. Users also seek more real-time monitoring and comprehensive application performance features, and simpler alerts and configuration processes.
What are the most important features?
What benefits and ROI can users expect?
Amazon CloudWatch is implemented across a range of industries, including technology, finance, healthcare, and retail. Technology firms use it to monitor application performance and traffic, while financial organizations leverage it for ensuring compliance and system reliability. Healthcare entities rely on it for maintaining service availability and monitoring data flow, and retail companies utilize it for tracking customer interactions and optimizing server usage.
Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is a powerful platform used for log management, analytics, and reporting. The solution is designed to provide organizations with automation, single-pane orchestration, and response for simplified security operations, as well as proactive identification and remediation of risks and complete visibility of the entire attack surface.
Fortinet FortiAnalyzer Features
Fortinet FortiAnalyzer has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Fortinet FortiAnalyzer Benefits
There are many l benefits to implementing Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Fortinet FortiAnalyzer solution.
PeerSpot user Imad A., Group IT Manager at a manufacturing company, says, “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. 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.” He goes on to add, “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.”
Luis G., Systems Architect at Zentius, mentions, “Log collection is the most valuable [feature]. The UI looks great. It has a very good look and feel. We don't have the need to use solid state drives. We use mechanic drives, and we don't see any performance issues, so basically, it is doing fine.”
Rupsan S., Technical Presales Engineer at Dristi Tech Pvt.ltd., comments, "The feature that I have found the most valuable is to be able to see everything in our network in a single task. A single menu and the graphical bar charts that it provides to give insights are very useful. It also gives very good metrics on bandwidth utilization, CPU, and device performance. It is very simple and easy to use as well."
Dilip S., Regional Head at Mass Infonet (P) Ltd., explains, “With FortiAnalyzer, you can see what the user is doing and what sites he goes to. You can also see how much quota there is and how much (size-wise) you want to hit, as well as what the incoming or outbound traffic is, and if it is through the ISP or not. Basically, you can see absolutely all activity using FortiAnalyzer. The solution is very complete. The product is very simple to use. It's regularly updated with many versions constantly adding more content and information. The solution has sandboxing, IPS, and DPS as well. The solution allows for a lot of customization.”
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