FortiManager

The standout strengths of FortiManager are its customizability/extensive uses, the visibility it provides, and how easy it is to manage many firewalls at once. FortiManager has many different ways to customize firewall settings and views. You can customize firewall rules to be extremely specific or broad. Additionally, you can look at setting up systems like SDWAN or VPNs through FortiManager. Next, Fortimanager offers amazing visibility. Being able to view all of the firewalls within one or two screens is extremely useful, especially within a large and complex environment. Finally, FortiManager makes it much easier to manage many firewalls at once. Instead of having to connect to each firewall and individually create rules, you can create one rule and push it to all of the firewalls. This allows our workflow to be much quicker and more efficient.

Ease of use Simple configuration Centralized control

What I like most is the centralized management capability. Being able to manage, deploy and audit policies across multiple FortiGate devices from a single console saves significant time, reduces configuration errors and ensures consistency across the network. The revision history and change control features are also extremely valuable for operational stability and troubleshooting.

The main weaknesses of FortiManager are a high learning curve, complexity within the program, and the potential for administrator's to easily disrupt the system. FortiManager is a complex program and it does have a high learning curve. It took my company a long time before we felt we were fully utilizing the program. Along with this high learning curve, the program can be complex. Even after we felt we had learned a lot about how to use FortiManager, we would sometimes be confused when trying to do something new. Finally, there is a real chance of an administrator disrupting the system accidentally on FortiManager. Some actions do not warn the user enough of the possible consequences, and unknowing administrators can make far-reaching mistakes.

Software stability Application on a pre-configured environment without it

The main drawback is the complexity of the interface and workflows, especially for new users. Some operations require multiple steps and the learning curve can be steep without prior Fortinet experience. In addition, performance can degrade in large environments during policy installs or database operations, which can impact day-to-day efficiency.