Fortinet FortiManager Reviews

We use Fortinet FortiManager to manage over 2,000 firewalls. We use the solution for reporting, implementing, and deploying policies and objects to the firewalls.

Fortinet FortiManager has saved us time by allowing us to create a lot of scripts that can be deployed at the same time to all the firewalls.

The firewall configuration has more capabilities than the other firewall management systems that I have worked with.

The reporting details have room for improvement.

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for six months.

I would rate the stability of Fortinet FortiManager a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Fortinet FortiManager an eight out of ten.

We previously used Sophos Firewall Central Management and transitioned to Fortinet FortiManager, primarily due to its industry reputation.

Fortinet FortiManager is costly.

I would rate Fortinet FortiManager a ten out of ten.

I recommend Fortinet FortiManager because it can be used for firewall configuration, reporting, PPMs, and deploying scripts.

We use the solution to manage the firewall and the policies and objects associated with it.

The product is easy to use and manage. It integrates all the global devices into one platform.

FortiManager should improve the integration with third-party platforms. Though the solution is easy to manage, we need adequate training to use it.

I have been using the solution for the past two years.

The solution is quite stable.

The solution is scalable. Around 20 to 30 IT employees use the solution in the organization.

It is a cloud-based solution. Around 20 people are needed for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Our organization pays a monthly license fee for the solution.

Only IT employees in the organization can use the platform. I would recommend the solution to others. I would rate the product a nine 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. 

Our company recommends the solution to customers as a single management platform for multiple Fortinet devices such as FortiAP, FortiSwitch, and FortiGate. 

The solution brings device management into one single pane of glass and is a pretty good product. 

The solution has some bugs that we have to fix for customers. We provide feedback about these issues to Fortinet for future development or updates. 

More software stability is needed to prevent breakdowns. 

I have been using the solution for one month. 

The solution is pretty stable and integrates well with cloud tools. 

More stability and bug fixes are needed to prevent breakdowns. 

The solution is pretty scalable and can support 4,000 devices on a single pane. 

Technical support could be better because it takes them awhile to handle items. More technical resources and knowledge are needed within the technical support department. 

The setup is straightforward. 

It is important to design and test systems to ensure they align with best practices in the security domain. 

We implement the solution for customers. Deployments are quick and take a couple of minutes to a couple of hours depending on use cases. 

The pricing is based on a licensing model by feature. 

The solution is used widely and is good for small or medium-sized enterprises. It can be scaled further for larger enterprises. 

I recommend the solution and rate it a seven out of ten. 

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.

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.

The solution can be deployed on the cloud or on-premise and it is used for managing network solutions.

The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiManager are the overall management it provides and its ease of use.

The solution has to be enhanced to manage new switches.

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for approximately two years.

The solution is highly stable and has good performance.

The solution is best suited for SMPs but not enterprises. If the company has many switches and access points and traffics with customization Fortinet FortiManager is not the correct solution.

The scalability of the solution is good. For example, you can use virtual machines and upgrade the license to scale.

I have not used vendor support.

The initial setup of Fortinet FortiManager can be simple. However, if the company has third-party systems from different vendors it can be complicated.

The price of Fortinet FortiManager is inexpensive.

Aruba is a better solution because it has more power.

I rate Fortinet FortiManager a five out of ten.

I primarily use FortiManager to manage FortiGate in a single console.

FortiManager has made it easier to push policy and has saved us money by providing free training.

FortiManager's best feature is the integration of administrator users.

FortiManager could be more user-friendly.

I've been using FortiManager for over three years.

I haven't seen any performance or stability issues with FortiManager.

The on-prem version of FortiManager is not very scalable.

The initial setup was complicated.

FortiManager isn't expensive, but its cost is dependent on which services are required. It has no extra or hidden fees.

I would give FortiManager a rating of nine out of ten.

I use Fortinet FortiManager for managing my FortiGate devices.

What I like best about Fortinet FortiManager is that you can use it with FortiGate. You can manage FortiGate devices through it. I also like that Fortinet FortiManager allows you to manage multiple FortiGate devices from a single console.

The Fortinet FortiManager dashboard is good, which is another pro of the product.

Areas for improvement in Fortinet FortiManager are scalability and stability.

I've been working with Fortinet FortiManager for three years. I'm still using the product.

Fortinet FortiManager could be more stable, so it's a seven out of ten for me.

I'd give five out of ten for Fortinet FortiManager, scalability-wise. It's in the middle.

I have experience contacting the technical support for Fortinet FortiManager. I'm giving the team an eight out of ten because I found it challenging to get support. Fortinet FortiManager technical support can be difficult to contact.

Positive

Fortinet FortiManager has a simple setup.

We implemented Fortinet FortiManager because it's just a process of downloading the product.

Fortinet FortiManager is a low-priced product.

I evaluated Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, but I found Fortinet FortiManager better and easier to manage.

I'm using Fortinet products, Fortinet FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer.

My company has between three to four Fortinet FortiManager users.

Fortinet FortiManager is a product I recommend to others.

I'm rating the product as nine out of ten because it still has room for improvement stability-wise. Its technical support also needs improvement.

My company is a Fortinet partner.