We performed a comparison between FireMon Security Manager and Palo Alto Networks Panorama based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewall Security Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."What I like about FireMon is the ability to track changes made by network engineers on the network."
"Firewall auditing is very important. We also use the solution for rule traffic analysis, traffic flow discovery and hidden/shadow rules within over 100 firewalls spanning five different brands."
"The most valuable features are the security assessments and the ability to identify unused rules or objects."
"FireMon decreases errors and misconfigurations by 10% that increase risk in our environment. That has to do a lot with the change reporting that is in place, but also with the built-in controls and custom controls that we have made. Those all decrease the errors that people naturally make on a day-to-day basis for firewall administration."
"It is a good product. Previously, we were using only spreadsheets to compare the usage, but now with FireMon, we are able to clean up or review the policies to some extent. It is still a work in progress, but we are at a good stage now."
"FireMon is nice and provides 360-degree user views."
"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."
"The most valuable feature is that everything is recorded in the historical logs, including the firewall rules, headcounts, object-level usage, and the rule documentation. The rule certification details are also there, which means that someone can be held accountable for a specific firewall rule."
"Templates and the possibility to apply a configuration to many devices at the same time are the most valuable features. We are able to create templates, and we don't need to go to each firewall to make changes. We can make changes in Panorama, and it automatically applies those changes to all those firewalls on which we want to apply the changes. It provides centralized management."
"Variable creation and template stack functionalities make Palo Alto Networks Panorama a brilliant solution. It is a completely scalable system, with good technical support."
"The threat prevention and layer seven security features were the most used and important for us. All operations are quite good in this solution."
"The solution is suitable for all sized businesses."
"What's most valuable in Palo Alto Networks Panorama is that it allows us to see the status on the network side, particularly on the endpoint, because we also use it for the internal network."
"Palo Alto technical support is excellent."
"A valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is reporting because it gives you different reports on data, logs, and threats. I also like the centralized firewall management feature of the product."
"It allows administrators to manage all firewalls from a single interface, reducing the time and effort required for configuration."
"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."
"Policy Planner requirements section is good, but could use some improvement to allow flexibility to enter different types of requests (modifying an existing policy, object or service group, for example) in a structured task format that can be auto-verified."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"Its reporting can be improved. I am the only one who works a lot with it, and I am having problems in terms of reporting. In the case of Palo Alto, I'm okay with it, but with some of the Cisco devices, such as routers, when I provide the reports to other teams for review, they always say that the hit count is incorrect. So, I was struggling for a long time to work with them. When working with other teams, they have a lot of questions about reporting, such as how it reports, and we are still struggling with that."
"We have not used the Policy Planner but even so, we have identified areas of improvement with it during our testing. For example, it could be better when it comes to ease of integration or ease of policy automation. Another problem is that there is a console where it has too many options and is not very straightforward. Essentially, controlling it could be made more seamless."
"Some of the things that you want to do in FireMon are not exactly straightforward, like creating certain reports or controls. Some of the functions could be a little more user-friendly, such as creating certain filters."
"The AWS integration is still not mature for us to use. It is just not ready for our use case for AWS connectivity. Therefore, it does not provide us with a single pane of glass for our cloud environments, because we can't manage our cloud environment with the tool."
"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."
"We found a vulnerability where when we have a low flow, like 2.7K, it is not getting fired by the threat prevention. That's something important to improve on. They should have a proxy or some solution to solve the issue. We also found some issues around decrypting the flow. When we have more flow than expected to decrypt, the performance goes down."
"It is not a cheap product."
"The alerts in Palo Alto Networks Panorama could improve by integration with other systems, such as a forwarding trigger system. For example, if a customer has their own system it would be helpful to have the alarms integrated."
"Lacking in speed and reliability."
"It can take a few minutes to test to see if any changes are successful or not. This needs to be improved. A commit change should take a second, not a minute or more."
"In our version, there is no feature to transfer or upload a database of third-party vulnerabilities or signatures so that Panorama can convert them into its own database. This kind of feature might already have come in version 10."
"My company's getting whatever it needs from Palo Alto Networks Panorama, but in the cloud, there's an issue with CPU management, and that's an area for improvement. Though the normal data traffic doesn't go through the management interface, whenever there's an increase in the throughput, CPU management becomes high. If you increase the load, CPU management spikes, and it's what needs to be taken care of in Palo Alto Networks Panorama."
"I am observing that whenever pushing our configurations sometimes the configuration will not push properly and then we have to go to the individual firewall and save it again."
FireMon Security Manager is ranked 4th in Firewall Security Management with 53 reviews while Palo Alto Networks Panorama is ranked 3rd in Firewall Security Management with 80 reviews. FireMon Security Manager is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks Panorama is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of FireMon Security Manager writes "Makes compliance much easier compared to doing it manually, and automates policy changes across environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks Panorama writes "Built-in proxy with the ability to maintain your own policies". FireMon Security Manager is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, AlgoSec, Skybox Security Suite, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and RedSeal, whereas Palo Alto Networks Panorama is most compared with AWS Firewall Manager, AlgoSec, Fortinet FortiGate Cloud, Tufin Orchestration Suite and Skybox Security Suite. See our FireMon Security Manager vs. Palo Alto Networks Panorama report.
See our list of best Firewall Security Management vendors.
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