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.

Policy and object reuse - the ability to create and reuse policy packages and objects across devices improves consistency and reduces configuration errors. Centralized management - FortiManager excels at managing large-scale deployments. It provides a central point to configure, monitor and update multiple FortiGate devices, which constitutes a huge time-saver for distributed networks. Granular user permissions - useful for enforcing security for teams with multiple administrators.

It has simplified policy deployment features using policy packages and templates. It provides centralized management of multiple FortiGate devices from a single console. It has features of effective change management with revision history and rollback.

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.

The user interface can feel dated. It has very limited reporting capabilities unless you pair it with FortiAnalyzer, which will require you to spend some more cash. Limited integration for non-Fortinet devices.

The user interface feels complex and less intuitive at times. Reporting capabilities are basic and often require customization. Performance degrades when managing large environments.