FireMon Security Manager Reviews

We were excited in the beginning about this solution because we have multiple firewalls in different regions, and so many rules. We wanted to find a solution that could organize our firewalls and remove the unused rules and redundant rules.

We use FireMon Security Manager. We don't use the Policy Planner or Policy Optimizer. We don't have a license for them. We started with a limited license and said, "If things go well with this, we'll go to the next step."

The solution has helped when it comes to the time and effort required to create compliance reports.

It has also given me some confidence in the changes I make. Before, I was very hesitant to make changes or remove rules. Now, FireMon has decreased the time I spend on that by 50 percent.

FireMon has also helped us when it comes to misconfigurations that increased risk in our environment. That is something that I have just discovered recently, when using it.

Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use.

During the first year of use we mostly reviewed the results FireMon gave us and used that time to learn about it. We did not go with the recommended changes in-depth, and we did not have many problems. But this year, we tried to go into the details and follow the recommendations. It helped us to remove and clean up a lot of our redundant rules, historically. But in the meantime, especially when we tried to do some advanced rule consolidation or cleanup of historically unused rules, we encountered problems.

The solution does not detect traffic or activities that come and go through our local or site-to-site VPNs. So when we cleaned up some of those rules and encountered issues, we actually had to put them back.

It's not just the VPN, but it also misses some of the rules. Two weeks ago, I cleaned some rules with the FireMon. I ran a report and FireMon suggested that certain tools were not used. When I removed them, while it didn't bring our environment down completely, a lot of our environment started malfunctioning. Our backup system did not work, nor did other things that involve internal and external communication. We are not comfortable with what it did. Since then, I have been busy the whole time just reviewing all those rules and restoring some of them.

FireMon also does not detect the rules with UDP. That's another problem.

Another issue is that our compliance team wants to do some consolidation but that is also a problem because FireMon recommends consolidation based on the ports that we open. We have a grouping system with multiple groups. Under the consolidation grouping, FireMon suggests only based on the port. For example, if we use port 22, we have to share it across the board. It disorganizes the groupings that we have. So the consolidation is not working very well.

Our compliance team also creates reports using FireMon, reports that they send to me. Sometimes I can follow those reports, but most of the time I cannot. In the last two days, I received two huge reports on unused rules and I cannot really use them. At the same time, I'm using my own judgment and my own due diligence. When I doubt a rule, I go back to the firewall and run the history and compare things to help me decide. The problem is that if I always do that, it will take me a lot of time and the solution ends up being 50 percent useful and 50 percent not useful.

I have been using FireMon for roughly two years.

I guess it is scalable, but there is room for improvement. 

I was not involved in the setup of FireMon but, later on, when I became involved working with it, I approached FireMon personnel through remote conferences and remote meetings. They helped over the course of several sessions and that was helpful.

Their technical support is very good, very responsive, and very helpful. They follow up on issues.

We did not have a previous solution. We just relied on regular reviews of our firewalls and rules by looking at the history.

The pricing was very good during our initial year, but they increased it this year a little bit. The price is okay. It is not cheap, but it is still average.

It is not a bad tool. I still recommend it and I'm not against it. I recommend it because, overall, it has helped us to remove and clean 15,000 to 20,000 redundant unused rules. When we cleaned those, we were confident that they were not usable. They were very old. But we didn't just rely on FireMon's report. At the same time, we used our own judgment. When we blindly relied on the FireMon report, it created issues.

It's a good solution, but it is not something that you can 100 percent rely upon. It is a useful tool. At least it will help you up to a certain percentage.

We work according to the risks FireMon warns us about, but some of those recommendations are false alarms and others are valid. If it gives us 100 warnings, about 10 of them are valid.

Despite all the shortcomings, we still prefer to use it. At least we get some good recommendations and suggestions in the reports. We like it, despite the drawbacks.

We only have security management. 

It was deployed on-prem. It used to be on the hardware, and there used to be an appliance, but we have switched to a virtual server. We are now on a VM.

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.

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.

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

It has been stable until this year when we had three weeks of downtime. We had an issue with data collectors, and they couldn't figure out what the issue was. They were troubleshooting for more than two weeks. It was up and down. It was probably related to the hardware because since we have moved to the virtual machine, we haven't had that issue.

It is a capable solution. We are in the process of buying more licenses and adding more virtual machines. We started with 20 licenses, and now, we have more than 60 licenses.

Their support is nice. They are very good.

I am not aware of any previous solution.

I wasn't there when they installed it.

It is a very good product. I always tell others to have FireMon people come and give a demo. I encourage people to try it out. We only have security management, but it is really a good product. I have attended a couple of their webinars, and they have a lot more features for more usage and value. It is a capable product. If our company had sent us for training and we had got to know more about the product, it wouldn't have been so hard.

To a colleague at another company who says that firewall policy rule clean-up and management is important, but it is just not a priority compared to other more urgent items, I would say that it is very important. Sometimes, a firewall is created temporarily, and if you don't know, you will forget. So, the usage and hit count information is very important.

In terms of compliance reporting, we have set it up for compliance reports such as PCI, but we didn't use it that much. Similarly, in terms of identifying the risks in our environment, it does show the changes, but we aren't yet able to prioritize them.

It is helpful in automating firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments, but we only have two vendors. We were earlier using it only for the Cisco environment, and now, we are using it for Cisco and Palo Alto. We will probably use it for the core environment. Overall, it notifies you, but we are still not using it that much.

In terms of the clean-up of firewall rules in a large enterprise environment, it didn't affect us, and that's because we are not doing it in the right way. We probably need somebody to help us on that one because we gave them the report, but they haven't cleaned it up. For Panorama, they use their own reporting, and we have to correlate them. One thing about Panorama is that if you have a rule from 20 years ago, and somebody is still modifying it, it doesn't update the new person's name. It doesn't ask you to put any change number. I know FireMon is only pulling the data, and it is not pushing the data, but I wish that it was pulling the changed data. The last time when I talked to FireMon, they said that they are just pulling the data. They don't go and push any data. For that reason, we don't have that much data. So, we have a report, but we haven't used it much for clean-up. We should use it in the future more. We also haven't used it to create a lot of policies.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

Our main use case is the monitoring of changes on our firewalls. Another of our use cases is keeping firewall rules in good shape by doing regular rule reviews, using FireMon's built-in categories for rules and even deploying our own. Additionally, we used FireMon when we did internal firewall migration, meaning we were switching to a new generation of firewalls.

The solution has decreased errors and misconfigurations that would otherwise increase risk in our environment.

In addition, when we migrated to a new generation of firewalls, FireMon was of help when doing a first benchmark of the new solution and the initial setup.

It also identifies risks in our environment and helps prioritize fixes for them. The compliance module in Security Manager does that by watching overall rules and any changes, and benchmarking them against a pre-setup set of controls. It notifies us if any control has failed. That's how we monitor whether our firewall rules are compliant with a pre-set benchmark.

Firewall policy rule cleanup doesn't need to be a priority for a company to justify using FireMon, given that it makes that job much easier and faster. That means you don't need to allocate as many resources to do that work. It's now incomparably easier to do things like a rule review.

Overall, our monitoring and compliance are on much higher levels. The visibility we have into our firewall rules is much better now than it was prior to having FireMon.

One of the most valuable features is the compliance feature, which is something that we really utilize in Security Manager. It has a set of controls that we tuned a little bit from the way they came out-of-the-box, and created a custom set of rules that we are monitoring and that we want to have inline in our environment. It's a very good solution for real-time compliance management.

And for the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls.

When it comes to real-time compliance management, something that is missing is alerting on certain, predefined controls. It would be good to have a predefined set of controls which, if not complied with in a newly set up rule, would create an alert for us. That is something that is missing, out-of-the-box. We have tried to work around it by setting up email notifications, but it would be nice if it came with the product. That would really turn it into real-time monitoring for us. 

The workaround works for us, and the out-of-the-box setup is also good, but it expects you to be constantly watching and monitoring the solution itself. That's a bit hard when you have more than one solution to work on. You cannot just watch one and keep an eye on it for something that's non-compliant. Having an alert would be much easier for us. Still, it's a good tool for that kind of monitoring, for us.

I have been using FireMon for about two years.

FireMon is quite stable. We haven't had any stability issues with it so far.

It's quite scalable. The process of adding modules has gone quite well. Anytime we have needed to increase it, there hasn't been a problem.

We use it extensively; if not on a daily basis then on a weekly basis. There are periods when we use it even more intensely when doing reviews.

They really give us great support. When thinking of the level of support that we get from some other vendors, FireMon's support is really good. They have a good, knowledgeable support team around the world. We have offices in Europe and California. Whenever we have had any type of issue and have needed their support, whether the issue is in Europe or California, we have had really great support from them.

We did not have a previous solution.

We had a FireMon support engineer for the initial setup and it looked fairly straightforward, but it definitely needed some FireMon knowledge. Since then, we have onboarded a number of new devices in FireMon on our own, and that part is quite straightforward. But setting up the system itself is something that requires the knowledge of a FireMon engineer.

For the deployment, there was a month of weekly sessions with the engineer to get it working.

We have three people, within our security staff, who are using FireMon regularly. The three of us were involved in deploying and we work on maintaining it. It's a shared effort. None of us is working full-time on FireMon.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We talked about other solutions with different partners, and based on that we decided to go with FireMon. We did have a proof of concept with them before going live, and we liked it and the options it had, so we decided to go forward.

We have a single server and we're a small group. We use FireMon to track all of our firewall rule changes.

The security section lets you see where your unused rules are and it lets us go in there, optimize it, and make the firewall more secure.

FireMon saves us a lot of time and it's nice because if you're adding a rule that's similar to another rule, it'll tell you so sometimes you can just edit the one and add another source or destination in there without creating a duplicate rule. It enables us to consolidate and have fewer, more meaningful rules. We're saving around 30% of our time.

I like the dashboard for the security section of it. It helps you identify the higher risk rules on your firewall so you can mitigate the ones that you were not aware of.

When it comes to real-time compliance management, we can use it to push out rules. We do that manually. But it's a great thing to be able to track and do everything because we were doing all that manually in the past and trying to go back and find something that we had done in the past the manual way was not working well.

FireMon decreased errors and misconfigurations that increased risk in our environment.

It also helped us to identify risks in our environment and helped to prioritize fixes. It does that through the security dashboard. It lists recommendations, zero-hit rules, and things that you just have out there that aren't being used.

It's been great for our security posture. Every hole we button-up is one less out there.

It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent.

I have been using FireMon for two to three years. 

The stability has been great. We have not had any problems whatsoever. It's very reliable and always available.

We're a small shop. We have everything on a single server, but I know you can put it across multiple servers for larger organizations. We're just not one of them.

There is one network engineer who uses it. But we have about a dozen people on there all together who are system admins that add rules.

We have our main site and a remote site, so it's two firewalls.

It's at 100% of the implementation.

Technical support has been very good. They always answer my questions. They'll stay on with you until they resolve the issue.

FireMon is a totally new implementation. We previously did everything manually.

We chose FireMon because it was recommended to us by the auditors and it was time to automate it as much as we could.

The initial setup was straightforward. We sat back and they installed it for the most part.

I don't remember anything bad about our FireMon consultant so I'm sure everything went smooth. We set up the servers, they set up a backup server and they had everything working when we got off the phone. They also had some additional training online for me, which I found helpful.

Our ROI is that it saves time and helps us improve security. 

Other than the initial purchase, we just put in for the renewals every year and somebody else worries about budgeting and everything. 

We haven't been using it for compliance at this point. The auditors use a different application for compliance. So we've been running that to check with security compliance.

I would rate FireMon a ten out of ten. 

The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance.

The review process is an area that needs improvement. We would like to review the rules and be able to make comments.

The advanced features are complex in setting up the rules.

I would like to see level mapping available with other products improved, to allow other products to build the level mapping. It does not have an export in Visio.

I have been working with FireMon for half a year.

We are using version 8.

This solution is stable.

It's a scalable product. We have five to eight people who are using this solution in our company.

Technical support is fine. I don't have any other issues.

I have not worked with any product that is similar previously.

Most of the setup was easy for us, but the advanced features are more complex.

Pricing is reasonable.

Licensing fees are paid every year.

It's a good solution that is stable, I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate FireMon an eight out of ten.

We are resellers. All of our clients are enterprise companies. 

The firewall assessment feature is great.

FireMon could be easier to use and flexibility regarding reporting could be improved. 

I have been using FireMon for six months.

FireMon is both scalable and stable. 

I've never had to contact technical support. 

I used to work with AlgoSec. They are both very good products but they target different customers in our market. One is more expensive than the other. One is more simple than the other to use. For this reason, we decided to go with FireMon. The profile of our customers is more related to FireMon than AlgoSec.

The initial setup was very easy.

FireMon is cheaper than AlgoSec.

My advice is to make sure you choose the right reseller because it's not a product you should use by itself.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give FireMon a rating of eight. 

FireMon is nice and provides 360-degree user views. You can also find the information you're looking for pretty easily.

I don't like that it comes with bugs, constant issues, and limited functionality. I would like to have enhanced change management reporting support for UTM features in the next release.

I have been using FireMon for six months.

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

We act as a business partner for our clients. We're implementors. Each client has a different use case. 

The solution is very stable. We haven't found there are any issues with its reliability.

The product scales well. You can really expand it if you need to.

This product is very simple to use. In that sense, it's one of the best on the market.

The technical support is very good. They've always been helpful.

I personally have started using it recently, therefore it's hard to pinpoint if anything is lacking. I need more time with the product.

The cost of the solution is pretty expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on their pricing.

My company has been using the solution for around five years or so. It's been a while at this point.

The solution is very stable. We've found it to be reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy or glitchy.

If a company needs to expand the solution they can. The product is very scalable. We've been satisfied with it.

We've currently applied for 20 users.

We occasionally need the assistance of technical support. We've always found them to be helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

The installation is pretty straightforward. It didn't take much time to install. It will take around 10 days of time to install in an environment similar to ours.

We have 30 people that deploy the solution to different organizations.

We're the deployment team. We implement this solution for clients.

The solution is expensive. It's not the cheapest option.

We've pre-paid for the license. We don't have to pay for it on a monthly basis.

We're using the latest version of the solution currently. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I've been very happy with the product overall. 

I'd recommend the solution as it's so easy to use. Clients are very happy with it.

The primary use case is optimizing firewall rules.

The firewall administrators have gained time back by using this tool, simplifying the firewall rule set. The solution helps to clean up rules which have not been reviewed in several years.

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 policy overview is the most valuable feature for each of the firewalls that we manage right now, as it reduces the complexity of the firewall rule set.

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.

The map needs improvement in our network. The tool should be able to map out the path of flow from one firewall through our network. However, it does not understand our routing environment, so it cannot do that for us.

We would like it if this solution could provided us with end-to-end change automation for the entire rule lifecycle, but the map feature cannot support our environment, for now.

It is stable, which is acceptable. I don't have any negatives with it. This is not a concern of mine, as we don't have any issues with stability.

We have probably one full-time equivalent managing the tool right now. Our ultimate end goal, that I am envisioning, is that we would need more support to manage the tool.

All the vendors in this space seem to overpromise and underdeliver on scalability. They all claim they scale the best, but none of them really do. This is an area that could be improved. It is the same with high availability. High availability for geographic separation is also an area that could be improved.

Right now, at this stage, only our firewall admins are using it. This is a team of about 20.

The technical support has been very responsive. They have helped us with all of the issues that we have encountered.

We didn't use a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. The wizard was easy to use. So, the initial installation of the tool was easy. However, when you get back into configuring the details for the map to obtain that single pane of glass view for the entire network, it was not well thought out and it could use improvement.

I would still consider us in an early phase of deployment, even though we've been using it for two years. We don't have all the firewalls licensed, so they are not all being managed by the tool. I would say we're still not done deploying it. We're still waiting on features to be developed by FireMon, so we can use it in our environment.

Our implementation strategy was to license the high value firewalls first, trying to start getting them managed by the tool, then we were hoping to do an initial pilot for firewall rule change management. However, we were never able to get to that step because the tool can't manage our network, or doesn't understand our network.

We used FireMon Professional Services.

We have not met a return on investment with this tool yet.

For the firewalls that we manage, it does help reduce our overall audit time.

We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time.

I'm not involved in our licensing costs, but I do know that FireMon has a wide variety of different licensing options.

During our proof of concept phase, we also evaluated Tufin, AlgoSec, and Skybox. We chose FireMon based on a few different things, but the main one was that they were a US-based vendor and the others were Israeli.

Each deployment scenario will be unique. A robust proof of concept is key to make sure it will meet all of your intended use cases.

The solution is managing 25 percent of our firewalls right now. We probably won't increase usage until we can get the required features for firewall change rule management to work correctly. We probably will not increase usage until that works.

I would rate it as a six (out of ten). We need the end-to-end mapping feature working to make it a ten. That is just our next phase. I don't know what other problems that we will run into. There is a lot to deploy before we can give all the details of what we need to make it a ten. There is integration with ServiceNow and some of our other tools. We have to make sure all that is working before we could give it a ten.

The primary use case is for compliance and monitoring of firewall changes. This solution allows us to secure our firewalls.

It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It saves us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture. 

This solution has helped to clean up rules that had not been reviewed in several years. It is used for all of our firewall changes. At the moment, we are not looking to do more than use it for that.

This solution has helped to reduce our overall audit time. We are under PCI, so it was a requirement. We had to do something like this, and it just made it easier. The solution was prebuilt to do that, and we didn't have to build our own spreadsheet.

The most valuable feature is being able to review all the firewall changes in the Policy Planner, and then in the policy review feature.

This solution provide us with comprehensive visibility of all our devices in a hybrid network.

It is fairly straightforward to use.

We had a few minor issues with it. However, it's worked pretty well for us overall.

The stability has been fairly decent, but there have been a few issues. My coworker has had some issues in the past where he has had to work with support.

It seems fairly scalable.

There are not a whole lot of users. It is mainly just my team. Every once in a while, one of my users will submit a request for it, but that doesn't happen very often. It is primarily just my team.

From what I have heard, the technical support is fairly good. However, I have not used them in a few years.

I didn't really have another solution that I was using before it.

We had it when I started here five years ago.

We had another guy who primarily worked on the setup because he actually used to work at FireMon. So, I haven't really done the setup on it in quite a few years.

The deployment was fairly straightforward.

We did the implementation in-house.

We have one guy, who previously worked for FireMon, managing the solution right now. 

We pay for it yearly.

We might have looked at Tufin.

It is fairly straightforward to use, and I haven't really had a whole lot of issues with it.

This solution provide us with end-to-end change automation for the entire rule lifecycle of firewalls. It does it from the request, then all the way through the approval cycle.

We really haven't done much with this solution’s cloud support automation for public cloud platforms. We are just doing on-premise.