FortiManager vs SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

FortiManager is well suited for any environment with multiple and dispersed FortiGate firewalls. It will not manage other firewall platforms. Therefore, you either have to use multiple centralized management software, one for each firewall vendor, or invest in alternative tools such as Tufin, AlgoSec, FireMon, SolarWinds, etc. However, you will not get a more inclusive tool for your FortiGate firewalls other than FortiManager.

Solarwinds Network configuration manager is great and robust for a high ended environment where we have hundreds and thousands of devices and tools for configuration and monitoring. And if the scope is limited, I don't think it is appropriate to use it there.

• Centralized FortiGate FW Management in a single console
• Available physical, virtual, or cloud deployment
• Single console for next-generation FW features
• Multiple Administrative Domains

• Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting.
• NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change.
• Keeps a record of which user made the change.
• Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available.

• Support contracts are difficult to manage or make changes to
• Next Generation subscriptions are managed individually, i.e. pegged to specific firewalls
• Cumbersome to bring existing firewalls to be covered under a single contract

• For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.

I simply love this product for what it does. it backups our configs and stores them so i don't have to worry about if we have current configs. It allows me to recover from a cisco failure in a matter of minutes rather than hours. I only have to copy and paste instead of recreate. so the maximum downtime we have is the time it takes to get the physical hardware replaced

The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.

To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.

Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it

Change management played a key role in our organisation. We didn't have any major downtime but it was crucial for us to get his product.

FortiManager is the best choice for managing numerous FortiGate firewalls. It allows for easy integration into ServiceNow and automates simple repetitive tasks that are very straightforward. Role-based access control is easy to enable and you can get quite granular with user permissions. Administrative Domains help segregate firewall management and compliance within the FortiManager console, by almost any classification method that makes sense to your organization.

At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment

• Allowed for quick migration from legacy firewall platforms
• NOC and SOC visibility of entire threat surface
• Intuitive user interface
• Extremely quick learning curve

• Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
• Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
• Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.