Fortinet FortiGate vs. Nagios Core

For FortiGate Firewall, the basic functionality and requirement is met easily as Fortigate is among market leaders in NGFW. There are some extra points that inclined us to use Fortigate as our main Firewall. [Fortinet]Fortigate has a very well refined and functional SD-WAN solution when it comes to load balancing for normal Internet Traffic. SD-WAN - Load balancing of Internet traffic is a USP of Fortigate and makes it stand tall in the competition. Be it 3 or more Internet Links, multiple Subnets/segments of users to distribute and bandwidth load balancing for links and users. SLA based monitoring of Internet Links / MPLS links, makes it even better to choose the links on the basis of performance (Latency, packet loss, Jitter etc). SSL VPN configuration - The deep CLI-level debugging is also very helpful in troubleshooting. Type of tunnel can be easily configured - Full Tunnel or Split Tunnel for SSL. Though, I think Fortigate is one of the best options for small and mid-sized organizations, there are some areas for improvement. First, the CLI interface is very hard to adapt as the commands and directory hierarchy is very different for common syntax and standards.

Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.

As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.

Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.

• It is the most reliable NGFW that we have ever been touch with it.
• You can easily upgrade the firewall cluster firmware without user attention!!!
• User IDentity based feature is fantastic and intrusion prevention just works with least false-positive possible.
• Very reachfull and intuitive GUI, just love it

• Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
• Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
• Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.

• When we switched to Fortinet Fortigate, it took some time getting used to and become familiar with the new interface. Being used to strictly command-line interfaces, a full GUI-based firewall was something brand new. Careful planning had to be done when creating rules to ensure we didn't miss anything. However, once we got used to the new GUI interface, going from one Fortinet product to another was simple, as Fortinet used the same interface for all of its devices.

• Nagios could use core improvements in HA, though, Nagios itself recommends monitoring itself with just another Nagios installation, which has worked fine for us. Given its stability, and this work-around, a minor need.
• Nagios could also use improvements, feature wise, to the web gui. There is a lot in Nagios XI which I felt were almost excluded intentionally from the core project. Given the core functionality, a minor need. We have moved admin facing alerts to appear as though they originate from a different service to make interacting with alerts more practical.

Fortinet's products have kept improving with new software releases and they continue to deliver great value. Their support is also very good. I believe that as a small enterprise, their products have given us competitive advantage delivering features and functionality that enable us to innovate and do things better. They also continue to be a leader in the markets they serve.

We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.

The user interface shared among many simultaneous users is very easy to get around. With shared favorites among users, most tasks are easily bookmarked and can quickly be found and edited. Their strategy for web filter integration is easy to understand and manage as well. With some general direction, setup and maintenance were easy to do and easy to teach others in the organization to do as well.

The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.

We had didn't any hardware failures at our two main office locations and upgraded our units last year after using them for about 5-6 years

Good performance and really good integration. We have integration with Microsoft AD.

We live in Turkey. Fortinet's Turkey office [dealt] constantly with us in our every problem or our experience. In addition, global support teams also supported every ticket we opened in every problem we encountered. They support innovative approaches and evaluate and offer solutions. In this context, they were very supportive of the problems we encountered in previous versions.

I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.

I received it a couple years afters use it and it was just to confirm my knowledge about the tool.

Make sure that you have the most current version of FortiOS. Make sure all Fortigates are on the same version

[Fortinet] FortiGate is not only cost effective but it gives the comprehensive security against the APT attacks and gives the complete traffic visibility and granular control. You can easily create the VDOMs (Virtual firewall) within a Fortigate firewall and customize the dashboard as per your requirement if you have multiple VDOMs within a single firewall.

Because we get all we required in Nagios [Core] and for npm, we have to do lots of configuration as it is not as easy as Comair to Nagios [Core]. On npm UI, there is lots of data, so we are not able to track exact data for analysis, which is why we use Nagios [Core].

My environments are pretty small (less than 100 users per location) so no issues here.

• Fortigates have an interesting bundle model for support and subscription services that make it an attractive option to deploy Firewall, IDS, Ant-virus, anti-SPAM in a single device. The cost of the bundle is pretty much what you pay for the device, not requiring huge expenditures on it's time to renew the hardware.

• With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
• You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.