TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

FortiManager

Score8 out of 10

6 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is FortiManager?

FortiManager delivers unified management for consistent security across complex hybrid environments, providing protection against security threats. Key benefits include accelerated zero-touch provisioning with best-practice templates for deployment at scale of SD-WAN and streamlined workflows between the Fortinet Security Fabric and integrations with 500+ ecosystem partners.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features FortiManager has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 6 ratings of FortiManager's features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Policy Compliance Auditing

    Automatic identification of gaps in compliance, remediation, and generation of compliance reports for auditors

    Category average: 8.2

  • Policy planning and rule management

    Monitor the effectiveness of network security infrastructure

    Category average: 8.9

  • Automated Policy Orchestration

    Automatically brings together all security controls in one place, automates changes and collapses risks

    Category average: 7.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Device Discovery

    Ability to automatically find all devices connected to the network

    Category average: 8.2

  • Firewall Rule Cleanup

    Ability to detect and cleanup rules that are either partially or completely unused, expired or shadowed

    Category average: 8.9

Reviews

What users are saying about FortiManager.
View all reviews

Excellent feature set, but not without its quirks

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use FortiManager to quickly manage 10 fortigates at our company. Previously we were manually managing fortigates by directly logging into them. FortiManager has helped us save time in upgrading firmware, and pushing new configs to our firewalls. We also wanted centralized log collection and parsing, which the inbuilt version of FortiAnalyzer provides.

Pros

  • Centralized management of fortigates
  • Dynamic objects and per device mapping of objects
  • Scheduled and centralized firmware updating system for Fortigates
  • Simple log collection and browsing

Cons

  • 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

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Other Software Used

FortiClient, FortiAnalyzer, FortiToken

Best Choice for Managing FortiGates

Incentivized
Shahab RazakView profile
Senior Network Architect in Information Technology at Finastra (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FortiManager is utilized by Security Engineering, Security Operations, Network Engineering and Network Operations as a single console to manage FortiGate firewalls in the Corporate, Datacenter, and Cloud grouped into several Administration Domains. FortiManager controls role-based access and user capabilities integrated with our backend Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) platform. FortiManager provides deep visibility and centralized control to firewalls deployed in our defense-in-depth global enterprise security fabric.

Pros

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

Cons

  • Support contracts are difficult to manage or make changes to
  • Next Generation subscriptions are managed individually, i.e. pegged to specific firewalls
  • Cumbersome to bring existing firewalls to be covered under a single contract

Most Important Features

  • Next Generation support features (e.g. AV, AS, WAF, etc.)
  • Multi-tenancy
  • Role-Based Access Control
  • Central Console for Firewall, VPN, FortiSwitch, FortiExtender, and FortiAP
  • SDWAN Management

Return on Investment

  • Allowed for quick migration from legacy firewall platforms
  • NOC and SOC visibility of entire threat surface
  • Intuitive user interface
  • Extremely quick learning curve

Alternatives Considered

Tufin Orchestration Suite, AlgoSec and FireMon

Other Software Used

Tufin Orchestration Suite, AlgoSec, FireMon