Fortinet FortiAnalyzer Reviews

FortiAnalyzer is a log analytics tool. Our company has around 600 to 700 people.

FortiAnalyzer helps us discover what's happening on the network.

They could always improve the interface and the user experience.

I have used FortiAnalyzer for four or five years.

I rate FortiAnalyzer eight out of 10 for stability.

Scalability is irrelevant to me because we have a small setup. One analyzer is enough for me.

Setting up FortiAnalyzer isn't complex and takes two or three hours. They have a prebuilt OVA we can deploy using Ansible. Next, we configure FortiGate to send the logs to the FortiAnalyzer. You can also download premade reports on the portal.

You pay an annual license based on the volume of logs per day.

I rate FortiAnalyzer seven out of 10.

Most importantly, it is for the administration of Forti fabric devices and reporting of Forti fabric, and being able to generate reports. It's for logging. All 40 fabric devices are able to send logs to FortiAnalyzer. Basically, the use cases are for administration, reporting, and logging.

Logging is the best feature. 

I like how everything is integrated with the FortiGate devices, FortiAuthenticator, and other fabric devices. You're able to see all the login details for the administration of FortiGate. It offers great user connectivity using that Fortinet embodiment of the user. It gives you all those login information details.

It's easy to set up.

The solution is stable.

It can scale well. 

It's very user-friendly.

The fact that it only works with FortiGate devices is quite unfair. We would like to do the reporting, logging, and administration of all the public devices and all the IoT devices. We wish to add the switches, and routers from different vendors, so it's not a vendor-specific diagnostic solution.

I've been using the solution for four years now. 

The product is 100% stable. I haven't found any issues with FortiAnalyzer. It's reliable.

Depending on the licenses you procure, the number of devices, and the storage space that you have, to be able to attain those logs and reports, the solution can scale. 

Support is great. Usually, when you call on them, they are right on time, and they'll be able to assign an engineer for remote session support.

Positive

Setting the solution up is pretty easy. It's just a matter of integrating with the Fortinet public devices. FortiGate will start sending logs and then reports to FortiAnalyzer.

Once it is set up, the solution is easy to maintain.

I'm not sure about the exact licensing costs.

I'm working with the latest version of the solution. 

We've done on-premises and cloud deployments. 

Usually, clients who don't have SIEM or Nag solutions find FortiAnalyzer quite effective as it's going to give them identification of the user activity reports on different IO devices and the usage of devices. It gives you visibility of your entire infrastructure.

I'd recommend the solution. It's very user-friendly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The normal use case for FortiAnalyzer is log review, log analysis, etc.

FortiAnalyzer makes it much easier for us to find an apparently compromised host on the network.

FortiAnalyzer has a robust ability to find a compromised host on your network, and when you identify a compromised host, you can address it.

Though FortiAnalyzer has improved over the last few versions, the user interface still has room for improvement. It's a bit dated-looking. I guess that's the nicest way to describe it. In FortiAnalyzer, I would like the ability to turn off some of the services. So, for example, FortiAnalyzer can take data from FortiCamera products and turn off the FortiCamera stuff to lighten the load on the box or turn off the FortiSock product.

I've been using FortiAnalyzer for about seven years.

FortiAnalyzer is really stable. It runs very well on its own and doesn't really need much TLC. It's a good product.

It's pretty scalable. The units that we have are the right size for the amount of stuff that we're running, but they do have products that scale up to handle significantly more Fortigate firewalls in log stuff than we do. I would say about 20 people use FortiAnalyzer. There's me, the security engineer, and the network engineering team, which uses it to look at stuff on the firewalls or check the firewall logs. And our information security group uses it to look at stuff that's going on with the firewalls as well as compromised hosts. It is being used pretty well as we get further down the path of deploying our FortiGate-managed endpoint product. There'll be more users and probably more use cases for it in the future.

I haven't really used a different solution previously. We've always used FortiAnalyzer in concert with Splunk.

FortiAnalyzer is a pretty straightforward product to deploy. It took half a day to deploy a pair of FortiAnalyzers and set them up in high availability mode. I deployed it by myself. These are hardware appliances, so there were a couple of devices that needed to be racked, powered, and configured.

I believe that these devices were procured with a five-year maintenance and support license up front. I work at a university, so the vendor provides a considerable higher ed discount.

It's all part of our Fortinet ecosystem, so we didn't really consider alternatives. I have a significant investment in FortiGate firewalls, so it just made sense to add FortiAnalyzer.

I rate FortiAnalyzer eight out of 10. It does an outstanding job of what it does. But the vendor doesn't necessarily live up to the hype, which is why it only got an eight out of 10. There's a lot of hype about the Fortinet security fabric. But for the large customers that buy their large firewalls and deploy them in infrastructure components, the Fortinet fabric does not work. If you are considering FortiAnalyzer, I suggest having a complete understanding of how your firewall infrastructure works in terms of what data you're going to and from it for analysis and what you're looking for in that analysis.

Most of our clients are banking and financial institutions, so their data doesn't go to the cloud as such. Their data is on-premises only. Some of our clients can go to the cloud to save the price and do management, administration, and so on, but then most of our clients, use on-premises FortiAnalyzer.

Fortianalyzer helped us to manage fortigate devices and update them from central location.

I have found incident management and also identifying new threats, analyzing the network traffic, and finding out the issues with the network traffic such as any security issues to be valuable. I also like the compliance reports.

It is a very stable and scalable solution.

One thing we struggled with FortiAnalyzer was integration with SIEM. We also had issues with the new threats and APTs. There were false positives, so we needed to have some ratings related to false positives.

It is easy to set up is you have FortiGate firewalls. We tried setting up with other devices, and I don't think it supports other firewalls or other devices. If it did, then it would have been great because we would have been able to use FortiAnalyzer for hybrid environments with different OEM firewalls.

If we can have an intelligent analysis system which will detect false positives and detect the exact problem, it would be great.  If FortiAnalyzer can integrate with FortiSIEM and give us threat reports, that will also help because then I won't need to have another tool or another dashboard which I need to look out for.

I've been using it for four years.

It is a very stable product, and we have had no issues at all.

It is easy to scale; there are no challenges.

The technical support is good. Most of the time, when we escalate the tickets the second line of support, FortiGate support, has been very good. The first line might take up time, but the second line of support resolves the case quite quickly.

Yes we used checkpoint for our organisation , but it was a complex system to manage, we expect a firewall to be a simple device to avoid complexity.

The initial setup is quite simple with FortiGate devices. So, if you have FortiGate firewalls, it is quite easy to set up. Once Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is configured, then the only thing we need to do is to monitor it.

When you compare with other firewall vendors, FortiAnalyzer is quite competitive in pricing. They are very aggressive as well.

Yes we did evaluate paloa alto , but it went into backburner due cost factor.

If you have critical objects to protect or critical data to protect, then you should go for FortiAnalyzer.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Fortinet FortiAnalyzer at eight.

For most of our customers, we are installing FortiAnalyzer as a VM-based solution. We installed a big analyzer for just one customer because they needed too much storage capacity. We have about 10 clients using it currently.

We prepare reports for our customers, and when the manager sees them, he's pleased. They show how many users connected, how many attacks happened, and the number of attacks stopped. The management of the IP depends on your report, so the customers need it. We are customizing these reports every day or every week, depending on what the customers need. We send emails with these reports, and the managers are also pleased about it. Also, technical guys are thrilled because they can solve problems very quickly. It's working on the SQL Server, so techs can do a quick search in real-time and see everything in the port analyzer's interface query.

FortiAnalyzer has a user-friendly interface with a quick response and good analytics. It's very secure because it's taking the log from the devices on a secure channel, so there is no problem with that in your network. Because you're getting the information from a secure channel, it's also possible to back it up in a storage solution. 

We have been installing FortiAnalyzer bundled with other products for about six or seven years.

Setting up FortiAnalyzer is very straightforward. It takes just 30 minutes or less. With our installation, we sent our FortiGates log, email logs, and other logs for the three devices we're currently running to the analyzers we are using within the public architecture.

The license depends on the storage capacity. If you want to take a log of up to 1 gigabyte daily, it's free, if I remember correctly. But if you want 5 gigabytes daily, it's licensed at different prices. The cost of FortiAnalyzer could be cheaper, especially when you are installing to a VM. For 90 percent of customers, the VM solution is enough. 

I would rate FortiAnalyzer 10 out of 10

The clients using this solution have wifi for their guests and for their own users. They want to know which user has used their wifi to access the internet, and probably use this knowledge for a kind of security management purpose.

The solution is quite easy to deploy. For the user, they don't need to have a lot of technical know-how. It is easy to generate the report for review by the management.

The solution is stable and reliable.

We have not faced any scalability issues.

The solution should be more price competitive.

I've used the solution for one or two years. I used it on a recent project.

However, the first time I used this product was in 2006 for our own infrastructure. We are not using it in our infrastructure anymore.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is reliable. 

In terms of scalability, it really depends. For our customer, the SME customer, not that many people need it. If you talk about scalability around analysis, related to the hub and space, the hub disk size, and the capacity of the box, for the on-prem model, we need to choose it with some buffer. We can't foresee any scalability issue for that customer. 

We only have one client on the solution. 

While I haven't directly dealt with technical support, I have not heard any complaints from my colleagues that may have. I would say that the support has been satisfactory for the moment.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. That said, I didn't handle it directly. We had an internal team that did the implementation. 

Most of the time, one engineer is sufficient for a small deployment, just two AP, one firewall, and one analyzer.

The implementation work was done by my engineers. We did not need any outside assistance from any integrators or consultants. 

I can't remember if they have a new license for software maintenance. They have maintenance that is charged annually. Unlike a firewall, they have a UTM license you need to pay annually and then only an annual maintenance cost for the hardware, for FortiAnalyzer.

I'm not sure what the exact price is at the moment. However, my understanding is the pricing could be better.

I would recommend the solution to others. We have been happy with its overall capabilities. I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution in order to analyze data.

If you have two devices that need to communicate with each other, so you can see where any issue is as you can see every single communication. It shows the flux of communication.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is its ability to pinpoint where the issue is. If two devices need to communicate together, you can see which interfaces they are using. 

The stability has been very good so far. We haven't had any issues with it.

Technical support is always quite responsive and very helpful.

Overall, the product is quite good. It integrates well and has good reporting and logging.

The user interface is good and it is quite easy to use.

From my point of view, at this time, the solution isn't lacking any features or functionalities. It's very complete for our purposes.

I've been working with the solution for less than a year. It's still quite new to me.

The product has been quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its been reliable in terms of performance overall.

I can't speak to the scalability. It's not an aspect of the solution I've tried to deal with. I'm unsure if it expands easily or if it would be difficult to do so.

I personally have opened two tickets with technical support in the past and everything has gone very well. They were knowledgeable and responsive and they helped me solve the issues. I have no complaints about their level of service. I've been very satisfied with them.

By the time I joined my current organization, the solution was already installed and configured. Unfortunately, I was not a part of the process and therefore can speak to how easy or difficult it was.

I don't handle the licensing or the costs. I can't speak to how much it is for our company or if it is expensive or affordable. I'm not privy to that kind of information.

That said, it's my understanding, as a comparison, that Fortinet products are cheaper than their Cisco counterparts.

We just installed our latest version a few weeks ago. It's the brand-new version of the product.

For those considering the solution, I've been told that it's cheaper to buy Fortinet or FortiGate instead of buying Cisco ASA. If cost is a concern, it might be a good idea to look at Fortinet.

We are just customers and end-users of Fortinet. We don't have a business relationship with them.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's largely been very good.

The primary use case for Analyzer, is for keeping the logs and for different types of reporting.

The features that our customers have found most valuable are their different type of reports including the drill down report, as well as the flexibility to connect to any number of appliances which can be connected to it centrally.

In terms of what can be improved, of course the cloud storage possibilities are there, but the cost and the renewal parts are high. Pricing-wise, it not affordable for the normal customer. Most of the people want to see different types of reporting, but FortiAnalyzer's fee is a little bit difficult.

We have been selling and supporting FortiAnalyzer for customers for three to four years.

All the Fortinet services are very stable products.

Maintenance and networking are under the Fortinet warranty so we cannot do anything on that. It means we can just coordinate things. It is based on the ticket.

I don't think the built-in memory can be upgraded for the Analyzer. I think it is not possible. That means that the hardware is more suitable for large companies.

Their support is fairly good.

The initial setup was simple.

In terms of fees, one is subscription and one is the hardware warranty. There are two types of subscriptions - one is a security subscription and the other one is the support.

A lot of products are coming with built-in facilities, but FortiAnalyzer is a much better solution. People may like it, but affordability is a problem.

For customers who need to have different types of reporting presentable to different levels of hierarchy, FortiAnalyzer is a lovely solution. Otherwise, there is no point in getting some logs. It should be presentable.

On a scale of one to ten, I'll give FortiAnalyzer an eight or nine.