Fortinet FortiManager Reviews

We primarily use the solution for managing FortiGate devices.

We like the central management capabilities.

The reports feature is excellent.

If you have more than one FortiMail device, you can't manage it then with FortiManager on FortiGate.

It needs more integration with more Fortinet devices. 

For how we use the solution, we do not need any new features. 

I've been using the solution for close to ten years. It's been a long time. 

I'm a consultant and I work with Fortinet solutions. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's been good overall. We've been pleased with its capabilities. 

We used Fortinet FortiManager for managing multiple firewalls, because they had six or seven branches, so they need a single point of management. The Fortinet FortiAnalyzer was used for getting the logs out of all of these books, to store them in one place.

What I found most valuable about Fortinet FortiManager is its simplicity. I didn't see anything special about it compared to other vendors, and I'm working with multiple vendors, but when talking about this solution, it's always the simplicity that's valuable.

There's nothing special about it compared to other vendors, except for its simplicity.

This solution needs more experienced technical support staff.

I've worked with Fortinet FortiManager for three years.

Stability for this solution is good. I didn't see any issues with our customer.

I wasn't able to try Fortinet FortiManager on enterprise customers, or large-scale customers, but for small and medium-sized businesses, it was more than okay. It's scalable.

How good the technical support will be depends on the product where we need them. For the firewalls, all of them are good. For Fortinet FortiManager, I didn't see a lot of experienced people in there, but I didn't need them for complicated issues. It's the technical support team for firewalls who was very good.

The initial setup for this solution was straightforward. As for its deployment, the design and planning took around three months, e.g. we talked about the design, project plan, scope of work, etc. Implementation just took one week.

For the ROI, for a five-year project, Fortinet FortiManager would be the best option to use.

This is an affordable solution, and it's based on the number of devices. I did read that the licensing model has changed recently, but I'm not using the new licensing model.

There was a solution we used last 2021. We implemented Fortinet, and it was the major project we were dealing with at the time. We used everything from Fortinet, e.g. analytics management, logs, etc. It was only Fortinet we implemented, and not any other solution.

We implemented Fortinet FortiManager for orchestration and management, then for the loads, we implemented Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. For firewalls, we have 4800F and 60F. We've implemented them in multiple sites, so those were the main components.

During the implementation, I jumped between versions and did some upgrades, because with Fortinet, there are new versions that only work for short periods, so I had to upgrade the version multiple times during the implementation.

The deployment for Fortinet FortiManager was via a virtual machine, and it was on private cloud. We used the customer infrastructure to implement and install Fortinet FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, so that particular cloud was owned by the customer, so there's no cloud provider for that.

We have 500 users of this solution. It was a medium-sized project.

I didn't see anything missing on Fortinet FortiManager. I like it the way it is. I'm happy with it, so I can't think of anything they should add in terms of features.

I would give Fortinet FortiManager the highest score because even a junior can implement it. It does not require too much knowledge or scale to implement a project, so I'm rating it a ten out of ten.

We use this solution as our core Firewall.

As our core firewall, it provides us with good protection.

The functionality is good. It has good features and it works well for us.

It has multiple features in one box, which helps to avoid needing a lot of equipment. This is something that makes them unique.

We have some visibility issues with the reporting. As the reporting is not properly available, we have to use many tools to get a meaningful outcome of the reports.

There should be training available for the clients. Cisco, for example, provides training hours or credits at the time of purchase. People should get some kind of coaching on how to use this solution and various features rather than depending upon the support partners.

The reports are available separately, but they should be a part of the standard product.

With this company, I have been working with Fortinet FortiManager for a year and a half.

It has good stability. It's reliable as far as the production environment is concerned. It is working well.

For us, it is fine as it is, because we don't have a large environment, and don't need such requirements.

It does provide the scalability for larger organizations with more sites. They may need to upgrade or maybe attach more devices.

We have good access to the portal, and the information can be pulled from there. The department is also helpful.

Our experience with technical support has been good.

Previously, we used another solution. We did a complete overhaul of our network architecture, which was the main reason we brought Fortinet FortiManager into our environment.

With some help, the initial setup was fine.

We had engaged the partner to implement this solution for us.

Fortinet is a high-end product and the cost is high. They should consider reducing the price, especially for existing customers.

If you want to add something or if you want to resubscribe, there should be some advantage given to the existing customers. 

In my opinion, in general, the prices are high.

Currently, it is fulfilling our requirements. We don't have any immediate plans to change, and we don't have any expansion possibility as such, because there is no expansion in our environment.

It is everyone's own choice what they want in their environment and what they want to prioritize.

Because I have some reservations, I would rate Fortinet FortiManager a seven out of ten.

The primary use case is internal security domain protection in corporate sites.

The most valuable feature is intrusion protection.

Everybody is quite happy with the way that the graphical user interface works.

The redundancy and resiliency are quite good.

We have experienced a series of minor bugs that necessitated contacted technical support on several occasions.

I have been dealing with Fortinet FortiManager for about four years.

This is a resilient product. There are bugs in the system but the vendor has been very responsive in terms of fixing them or looking to them. None of the bugs were major, so we just had to use work-arounds until a new version came out that fixed them.

Scalability with FortiManager is fine.

The ability to upgrade, or downgrade if necessary, is very good.

We have made quite a lot of support calls to deal with bugs and other issues. The technical support is very responsive and there was no problem with it. I would say that they are excellent. My only problem is that we needed them perhaps slightly too often.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

Our deployment took about six months in total, although we were limited in resources and the requirements of operational handover. My engineering group has to stick to documentation and testing and requirements from the operations team. There were no issues with the deployment. Rather, that is how long it generally takes.

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment and maintenance. We have about 10 engineers, although they support all of our networking products.

There are features that come at a cost that is in addition to the standard license.

In general, I have no serious concerns about this product so I have no problems recommending it. It has all of the features that I need, as far as I'm concerned. Certainly, there's nothing that would cause me to suggest that people not use it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it on a virtual machine in our data center. We are not using a box.  

We have many types of clients so there are many types of use cases for our clients who we are deploying FortiGate for on-site to create the local network. Many sites are using FortiGate firewalls like 60E, 100E, 200E and 500E and some 3100D.  

We are using what we call zero-touch deployment. It is a very important technology or process that helps us to make the deployments efficiently. It is called zero-touch deployment or ZTD. It helps us to implement our configuration on these client sites by using FortiManager. Zero-touch deployment is the central piece here and it is made possible by the use of FortiManager. What happens is we prepare our configuration in the FortiManager. After that, the technicians who are doing the installation just need to connect the instance of FortiGate to the internet. They only have to do that and FortiGate automatically downloads the configuration from FortiManager. So this is the way we can optimize the implementation and reduce the duration of the setup time involved.  

It would normally take us a handful of days to install one FortiGate instance on one site. But with this technology, zero-touch deployment, we need just one hour or maybe as little as 30 minutes to install one site. It is much more efficient. We reduce the time further by installing the configuration in all the FortiGate instances that we are managing at the same time. For example, say we need to install a new policy to deny or to allow something to connect to the internet. We can create this configuration in the FortiManager and we can push it out to 100 or 200 FortiGate instances at the same time. So it helps us to reduce the time it takes to install and to perform maintenance as well as to minimize the errors. We are human so errors are more frequent than a deployment managed by a machine. With this process, if anything is wrong it is also easier to correct.  

The most valuable feature in FortiManager is the ability to automate the deployment processes and maintenance.  

Not just in FortiManager, but in any Fortinet project in general, the troubleshooting is very hard. If you compare it with other products from other vendors like Cisco or like Palo Alto, it is just more difficult. Say we are in a situation where we need to do some debugging. It is very hard to understand and to use the CMD and the CLI commands because there is not very much documentation. There is no description when you are using the CLI and there are no examples to follow. So it is hard to do some troubleshooting to find a problem. There is FortiAnalyzer that can help with this but it is not real-time. It is too hard to view real-time inbound and outbound traffic. Because we are network engineers and network administrators, we always need to have some time real-time traffic to view what is happening now, as it happens, to know what is really going on.  

I have been using Fortinet FortiManager for about two years.  

I would say that the product is not stable all the time. Sometimes, I need to reboot the virtual machine after we do some configuration. The configuration changes will only take place after a reboot. It is something that should not normally happen this way. We should not have to reboot it, but sometimes it happens that we are forced to.  

I think the product is very scalable. We can add a new instance of FortiGate with a simple click. We can configure it with high availability using two VMs active-backup. It is a very good product from the scalability point of view.  

There are now more than five people who are currently using FortiManager in our company and we are counting on more as we grow. We are a growing company of integrators. We have been on a mission for three years in our region to service our clients — all of them have more than 500 employees. We also have built up to more than 5000 employees total. These same five people using FortiManager are also what we need for the maintenance of the systems.  

The technical support is very good when I work with them. In reality, I give them seven or eight-out-of-ten. This is because sometimes you have a very good engineer; sometimes you do not get a very good engineer. This is the reason for the lower score. Last time we created a ticket, it took two months to resolve the problem. For the first month, I was working with someone who did not have a very good understanding and methods for resolving the problem. But, after that, I was allowed to work with another engineer who was very good. He was very good both technically and his methods.  

I work mostly with Fortinet now. I work with FortiGuard and FortiGate firewalls. I work with FortiExtender to connect with the 4G network. I work with FortiAnalyzer and FortiManager to manage the FortiGate firewalls. I use FortiManager with the network administrator on top to manage many firewalls at the same time. I can use FortiAnalyzer to analyze our network, to give us a lot of information about the stability of the network. And also to get reports like what are the top 10 hosts who are using the network.  

Before using FortiManager, generally, I worked with other vendors like Cisco, with FireSIGHT to manage the Firepower firewalls from Cisco installations. It was essentially the equivalent to FortiManager. It managed Firepower firewalls. I worked with around 700 Firepower firewalls and one other FireSIGHT appliance which was not VMware. But I found that Cisco was a little bit hard to manage. It is not very stable and we had some problems with it. We opened a ticket and I could see now that we did not get a good solution from the technical support. We just made a workaround which is not a good way to resolve issues. But in general, FortiManager is better than the FireSIGHT as a technology and as a solution.  

The initial setup is simple. It is not complex at all. We are using Fortinet FortiManager in our main data center and it publishes via virtual IT, or VIT, to our facility to connect to us from our spoke site. It is very simple, I think.  

Generally, what I know about the pricing is that Fortinet FortiManager is not expensive at all if you compare it with other vendors like Check Point and like Cisco. Fortinet products are the least expensive on the market in the category of firewalls.  

Really, it is not me who chose this solution. It was the staff before I come here. I do know the staff chose it as one of many potential options to be presented to the clients.  

I personally have a specialty using Fortinet but also SolarWinds — although not so much. But I am quite a bit more familiar in working with Cisco and Fortinet.

My advice to other people considering this solution is that they have to read about the product and they have to make an effort to pass the NSE 5 (Network Security Analyst) certification. It is for FortiAnalyzer and FortiManager products. Fortinet NSE 4 (Network Security Professional) certification talks about FortiGate and prepares your solution in a global sense. It is also very good to have. The main certification to have in my opinion is to pass the NSE 7 (Network Security Architect) certification because it talks about what I think is the negative part of Fortinet products, the troubleshooting. So my advice is that it is very important to pass the minimum of these three certifications to manage the solution with some level of expertise.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate FortiManager as an eight. Additional features I would like to see included in the next release of FortiManager to make it a nine or a ten is to be compatible with the management of other products like not just FortiGate. For example, it might work with FortiExtender.  

Our use case is for management and back up configuration. I work in the IT security division. 

This is a good product if you're looking for a central management solution. FortiManager provides good log management and more details than other solutions for logs.

I'd like to see the improvement of wizards when it comes to pushing policies and copying, VPNs, etc. Sometimes Fortinet changes its subscriptions. A few years ago Fortinet Firewall had capabilities for use in the cloud environment; they then changed the subscription and it was no longer part of the subscription, forcing the customer to buy an additional license. The technical support needs to improve. They moved their call center to India and although I have a special PIN code for the support team, they hang up after a minute or so and I need to redial. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable but it does require regular upgrades. 

We can scale but it requires the purchase of additional licenses.

We deploy this solution for our clients. It's a pretty straightforward process for us. 

The price is reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco or Palo Alto. It also has a free version for smaller organizations. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are using FortiManager to manage all the equipment. We have a hybrid deployment.

We are managing a research and education network, and we have about 200 Fortinet FortiGate devices dispatched in the country. We are managing all of them with FortiManager. It has simplified the management and reduced the time to configure the devices.

It is easy to manage a large number of devices with FortiManager. 

Its licensing model should be improved.

We started using it this year.

It is a stable solution.

It is scalable.

Their support is very good. I don't have any issues with their technical support. 

It is very easy.

We did it ourselves.

For us, it is a little bit expensive.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

There is something called zero-touch provisioning, where you can add a new device without any configuration. You just add it to FortiManager and then forget about it.

FortiManager could be simpler.

I'm not using FortiManager at this company, but I've been using it with different organizations for maybe five years. So haven't been using it continuously. Sometimes it's a different solution.

I would say that FortiManager is stable.

It's fairly easy to scale up FortiManager. I think it's suitable for large businesses. 

Fortinet's support is good. 

Setting up FortiManager can be complex because it involves changes from other devices and a lot of configuration. The time needed for deployment depends on the environment and size. For a small environment, it takes two or three days if it's the environment.

FortiManager is not too expensive.

I rate FortiManager seven out of 10. I would recommend it to others.