It's very easy to scale up or down.

Every time we get a new customer, we put it in. The customer has to have a VM set up for the hardware requirements of FireMon, or we won't monitor their systems.

Scalability has potential. It could have more. Maybe a cloud environment is something that we should look into since there are many more layers once it gets out to the cloud. However, we don't want to trust the vendor completely. We just want to be able to see our environment.

It is used to monitor our firewalls and network devices from the US to Asia.

Scaling is simple. You can easily scale it and maintain it with any size team.

We are using FireMon in a couple of departments. I work for a government office, and we have a lot of different departments under us. We have a need to increase our usage, because we always have people coming in. We're at the very beginning of moving to the cloud. When we move to the cloud, we're going to multiply our usage by at least tenfold, because people at remote locations will then be able to make use of the services.

We have at least half a dozen people using FireMon. Their roles include the people that manage the hardware that it's installed on as well as the admin managers who look at it day-to-day to see what the configuration is like. The admin guys can do analysis but there are also analysts who get the alerts and who work on the action items related to the alerts. They investigate and then they know what mitigation actions to take to prevent attacks or to deal with whatever FireMon is reporting on. For deployment and maintenance we need just three people.

Maintenance is connected with the need to upgrade. They have to seek funding for it to happen and get the funding arranged. If it doesn't require any funding, if it's just internal work that needs to be done, then the admin guys can do it without having to involve anyone else. If there's any need to connect with FireMon, that is done as well.

The on-premises deployment is pretty scalable. We have four or five collectors, which is a pretty decently sized deployment. Adding more connectors is just spinning up a new VM in most cases.

We don't have too many connected devices, although that is something that we're working on. It's part of the initiative. We're also looking into gathering information from AWS, the Amazon Web Services, although we're hitting a few roadblocks and we're working with FireMon about.

In that sense, in the way that we want to scale in the Amazon environment, we're just getting clarification from them about it. That's the only downside for scalability that we've found so far. It may be a non-issue but we're working with them to figure it out.

There are no issues with scalability.

We have different business units in different countries. For example, we have users in Hungary and they're a different business unit. They're not given access to the firewalls or Panorama, although they were given access to FireMon where they can view the policies related to the Hungarian firewalls. There are between 10 and 15 people in the Hungarian business unit that use FireMon on a regular basis and their role is to view the policies.

We have a few people from the NetOps team and the network technical center team that use the rule certification process, and they collect statistics on rule usage. These teams have mid-level privileges on the system.

I have superuser privileges, and there is one other person that has the same access I do. He uses it for documentation on the firewalls for our offices in the Netherlands and Poland. Aside from these, we have other people who use it more generally for things like viewing rules.

FireMon is being extensively used within the company and we have a few new users being onboarded next week. They are part of a third-party contract and the user count will increase, although I don't think that any new modules will be added.

I have good things to say about scalability. They do have multiple ways of deploying it. If you are a very small company, you can have everything FireMon on one appliance, which is kind of cool. As you need to scale, you can add resources to the database and application servers. You can also add data collectors throughout your environment, which is the biggest thing. The data collectors are machines that retrieve the firewall configuration and receive firewalls usage logs.

Scalability is good. The appliances themselves are massive. We're not the largest of FireMon's customers, but as we grow, the amount of compute resources just in general that FireMon is going to be using will be huge as we grow. So, it is scalable. The architecture makes it scalable, but they are beefy, i.e., In terms of compute resources that these appliances use, just the specs on them.

We do have plans to increase usage, if pricing and resources permit. Right now, we have all our firewalls reporting in FireMon. We also have our network topology loaded in FireMon.

It's hard to scale FireMon. You have to add a lot more appliances or virtual machines to run the software and scale it appropriately. Because we're a worldwide organization, we've had to do a lot of that. We've had to split out our application servers and databases. We have three instances around the world and we're probably going to need to add more as we go forward, because it does have some limitations in how much it can process at any point in time.

It's also, in part, a Palo Alto issue because Palo Alto processing is very slow. So in the handoff between Palo Alto and FireMon, we've had some issues where FireMon doesn't always retrieve the configurations in a timely manner. When we run a report that is not necessarily running on the current data for all firewall rules, a firewall rule will suddenly be flagged as "not used," for example, when it really is used.

We're a small shop. We have everything on a single server, but I know you can put it across multiple servers for larger organizations. We're just not one of them.

There is one network engineer who uses it. But we have about a dozen people on there all together who are system admins that add rules.

We have our main site and a remote site, so it's two firewalls.

It's at 100% of the implementation.

It's very scalable.

We have about 60 users configured and that's because everyone on both my team and the networking team has access to it. But we never have more than four concurrent users.

We intend to increase usage, but the goal is to move down the path of integration with our ticketing solution and the actual firewalls themselves. Right now they communicate, but they're not necessarily integrated. Once we achieve that, then instead of network engineers logging into firewalls to do firewall things, they'll be shoehorned into performing everything that they're doing now within FireMon - meaning Security Manager - rather than it being something they pull up whenever they have a use for it. The intent is to make it more of a foundational piece of our operational procedures.

We're a pretty small shop, so I don't know how it would scale for a Fortune 100-sized company. Based on the feedback I've had, it's been great. We haven't had any problems with capacity or what we have needed to do.

We have 10 people using it who are system admins, network admins, and security analysts. I wouldn't say we use it extensively. It's something that any given person probably uses once a week.

It's possible that we would purchase some other modules that could give us a little bit more insight into the implementation and the planning side of things. But we like what we have for now. We don't have any direct plans to purchase more.

FireMon is scalable. The scalability is based on the number of licenses.

The scalability is great.

No.

All the vendors in this space seem to overpromise and underdeliver on scalability. They all claim they scale the best, but none of them really do. This is an area that could be improved. It is the same with high availability. High availability for geographic separation is also an area that could be improved.

Right now, at this stage, only our firewall admins are using it. This is a team of about 20.

No…we easily added a second data collector when needed.

There were absolutely no scalability issues.

It's highly scalable, as long as you have servers. You can scale it to pretty much anything. We've had thousands of devices in it.

We haven't had any issues with scalability as we're not using that many devices reporting to it, so we haven't had any problems with scalability at all.

The only scalability problem is having an offloaded log collector, because we do send a lot of logs. We have our own servers that do the log collection and we need to make backups of that. As far as that’s concerned, no, we haven't had any issues with scalability. We can expand much further than what we have.

It is a capable solution. We are in the process of buying more licenses and adding more virtual machines. We started with 20 licenses, and now, we have more than 60 licenses.

I guess it is scalable, but there is room for improvement. 

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I believe that FireMon is scalable. 

If a company needs to expand the solution they can. The product is very scalable. We've been satisfied with it.

We've currently applied for 20 users.

We have three major production firewalls pushing thousands of logs every hour to this one box. We have two boxes in both of our data centers but they push a lot of logs to these guys. We've never had any issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. We haven't run into a limitation yet.

We have not had any scalability issues and I've been very impressed in that aspect. At one point, we had a single server and we overloaded it pretty quickly, with the amount of logs that we sent to it. The firewalls generate a ton of traffic as far as syslog goes. So, I had to out-size our environment to compensate for the additional logs and had to deploy to a couple of other different sites, that initially we didn't imagine having a need for. However, it scaled up great and we've had no issues with it since then.

I have not had any scalability problems at all.

We have a fairly limited amount of systems that are monitored by FireMon. Our box can support up to 20-25 devices. We only have eight devices to monitor. We still have a lot of overhead. We haven’t noticed any slowdown issues or any problems of a scalable nature on the device.

I think the scalability seems fine, although not all of our gateways are licensed so that in itself also caused some issues, because the product had to be more tuned to the fact that our environment doesn't utilize FireMon for all of its gateways.

It's a scalable product. We have five to eight people who are using this solution in our company.

It seems fairly scalable.

There are not a whole lot of users. It is mainly just my team. Every once in a while, one of my users will submit a request for it, but that doesn't happen very often. It is primarily just my team.

We have quite a large Check Point environment (>60) with a lot of rules. Reports may be a bit slow but they are so valuable that they are worth the wait. Newer, beefier appliances may also be available from FireMon.

The scalability seems to only be limited based on licensing we have installed. It appears to be fairly robust. It does offer a very large variety of devices that it can monitor but it's only limited based on the licenses that we have installed. For example, when I started here over a year ago, the device was licensed just for Cisco ASA5520s, and now we're using it to also monitor 5545s, which is a different tier. Until we licensed it for that different tier, we weren't able to ingest the configurations or monitor those newer devices. It truly comes down just to licensing. So, making sure we have the proper licensing is key. From what I've seen, it can monitor many devices, from routers, switches, up to the firewalls, from across many vendors.

My organization only used FireMon for Cisco ASA products, so I am not sure if it works with other firewalls but it does support other vendors.

We have not had any scalability issues. I've been very impressed with that aspect. At one point, we had a single server and we overloaded it pretty quickly with the amount of logs that we sent to it. The firewalls generate a ton of traffic as far as Syslog goes.

I had to out-size our environment in order to compensate for the additional logs. I had to deploy to a couple of different other sites, that initially we didn't imagine having a need for. However, it scaled up great and we've had no issues with it since then.

No problems.

It's quite scalable. The process of adding modules has gone quite well. Anytime we have needed to increase it, there hasn't been a problem.

We use it extensively; if not on a daily basis then on a weekly basis. There are periods when we use it even more intensely when doing reviews.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability so far.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

FireMon is both scalable and stable. 

No issues encountered.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.