FireMon vs. Salt Project

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
FireMon
Score 7.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
FireMon is a real-time security policy management solution built for today’s complex multi-vendor, enterprise environments. Supporting the latest firewall and policy enforcement technologies spanning on-premises networks to the cloud, FireMon delivers visibility and control across the entire IT landscape to automate policy changes, meet compliance standards, to minimize policy-related risk. Since creating their policy management solution in 2004, FireMon states they've helped…N/A
Salt
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.N/A
Pricing
FireMonSalt Project
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FireMonSalt
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
FireMonSalt Project
Small Businesses
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.2 out of 10
HashiCorp Vagrant
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FireMonSalt Project
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(69 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.6
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(17 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.2
(48 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FireMonSalt Project
Likelihood to Recommend
FireMon
FireMon is best used in a large environment (for example, I have >100
firewalls in my environment). It's best used when trying to improve
security posture and showing changes in firewall security over time. It
might not be the best choice for smaller environments or those that aren't concerned about security management.
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Open Source
SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.
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Pros
FireMon
  • Give good real time reporting for anyone making a change to any of our firewalls
  • Provides good reporting tools that are out of box
  • Provide good customization tools that is specific to our needs
  • Upgrades are a simple process and support does relatively well with assisting us.
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Open Source
  • Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
  • Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
  • Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.
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Cons
FireMon
  • Some features could be added to the existing functionality which include NAT rules usage
  • Rule expiration normalization from firewalls rather than entering them in rule documentation
  • .csv exports of the files from the firewall pane only gives usage for 30 days by default and that should be increased
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Open Source
  • Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
  • SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
  • SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started
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Likelihood to Renew
FireMon
The shell is locked out and we can't run any general centos commands. The implementation and maintainence of the arch is very complex. Even with the right identifiers on log messages the log collection keeps failing. The warning messages on the device are ambiguous. The log messages on firemon are a bit confusing and don't show the exact issue.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
FireMon
It save me time and I'm able to have the review - review the rule independently with using my time.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
FireMon
FireMon has been relatively stable overall. However, there have been a handful of times where we had issues with the console. For example, we couldn't update which devices to include in a security assessment. The initial suggestion from support was to just reboot it. It seems like there weren't many other options available such as to restart services before going to the extreme of a complete reboot.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Performance
FireMon
I'm not sure we have the largest implementation of FireMon out there but we do have a few 1000 devices being probed by FireMon. Overall, the system's performance has been rock solid. The console refreshes quickly and reports are generated within an expected timeframe.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
FireMon
FireMon technical support is awesome! They respond quickly to our requests and they are well trained and very knowledgeable about the tool. Some issues have to be referred to the development team, but technical support largely provides solutions for any issues that we may have.
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Open Source
We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
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Implementation Rating
FireMon
Implementation is fairly simple. Most issues can be resolved by referencing manuals.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
FireMon
I has worked with AlgoSec and while they are very similar product, I find the FireMon is easier to understand and get rolling with. While both require some learning, FireMon is by far the easier one. Once you have an understanding of how things are arranged and labeled you can easily import firewalls and begin to work on them to improve them
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Open Source
We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
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Scalability
FireMon
Firemon Is easily scalable and maintainable with any size team. Although it requires some tech debt, it is well worth the time to invest to ensure compliance is visible and reports are accurate. Although our environment is very large we do not fully utilize the scalability of the Firemon product.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
FireMon
  • FireMon's Compliance Reporting provided an immediate and tangible benefit
  • FireMon helps identify egregious or erroneous rules quickly across multiple platforms
  • FireMon took our audit process from an Excel spreadsheet into a far more advanced process with readily available context for reviewers
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Open Source
  • We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
  • Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
  • Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.
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