FortiAnalyzer vs. FortiManager

FortiAnalyzer is well-suited for deployment in large organizations characterized by substantial traffic volumes and extensive user bases, facilitating the acquisition of detailed logs and comprehensive dashboards. Nevertheless, in my opinion, its utility may be comparatively limited for smaller organizations, where the firewall alone can provide a sufficient overview of the network traffic.

Incentivized

FortiManager is well suited for larger organizations which require unified configurations and IT departments that need quick turn around on firewall related tickets. I believe MSPs can also benefit with the use of the VDOM feature, if strict separation between clients is needed. FortiManager wouldn't be ideal for 1-3 site operations, unless their configurations are extremely complex or have a high number of active users.

Incentivized

• Custom dashboard
• VPN traffic monitoring
• Internet traffic monitoring
• Users behavior analysis
• Integrate well with the FortiGate firewall
• Log analysis

Incentivized

• Centralized FortiGate FW Management in a single console
• Available physical, virtual, or cloud deployment
• Single console for next-generation FW features
• Multiple Administrative Domains

Incentivized

• Administrative Domains and Software Versions are difficult to maintain
• managing different FortiOS versions gets complicated quite easily
• Administrative Domains must be well architected from the beginning

Incentivized

• Various bugs: The software is buggy, and if you don't have a good understanding of it's underlaying operation, you can get confused or stuck when pushing a configuration. There are lots of little quirks you will have to learn, which are not described in any documentation.
• Conflict resolution: Occasionally, during larger changes, bringing new devices in, pushing a config will fail due to dependencies, conflicts, or other software bugs. This is somewhat time consuming because the error messages provided aren't descriptive
• CLI Options: Some configuration changes require creating scripts that execute on each device, and can't be done via the GUI

Incentivized

FortiAnalyzer is easy to deploy are ready to use right out of the box. The user interface is intuitive and the reporting engine is very customizable however most of the 'canned' reports are usable right away. It is easy to add firewalls under management and event correlation happens immediately. FortiAnalyzer is a great log aggregator for all of your firewalls and then upload meaningful data to a SEIM.

Incentivized

FortiAnalyzer is significantly cheaper and a better value for the money especially if you have FortiGate firewalls in the datacenter or in the cloud. FortiAnalyzer manages physical, virtual, and cloud firewalls in a single pane of glass providing a wholistic enterprise view of your security landscape. Compliance reporting comes built-in with the most popular reports ready at a click of a button. FortiAnalyzer is a great aggregation point before uploading logs to a SEIM / SOC tool.

Incentivized

FortiManager is the best choice for managing numerous FortiGate firewalls. It allows for easy integration into ServiceNow and automates simple repetitive tasks that are very straightforward. Role-based access control is easy to enable and you can get quite granular with user permissions. Administrative Domains help segregate firewall management and compliance within the FortiManager console, by almost any classification method that makes sense to your organization.

Incentivized

• we were able to retire 3 legacy security tools in favor of FortiAnalyzer
• Automate 155 security tasks and reporting
• one click compliance reporting for PCI-DSS
• Enterprise security governance
• Visualize the security landscape
• Eliminate and or prune unnecessary rules
• Tune overly permissive rules for tighter security

Incentivized

• Significant reduction in new firewall deployment turn around time, 50% reduction
• Reduction in time spent on website access related IT support tickets. Avg 5 minutes from response to close
• Reduction in time spent by IT team for setting up WFH employees to allow working over SSL VPN.

Incentivized