FireMon Reviews

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Score 7.7 out of 100

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Reviews (1-25 of 49)

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October 16, 2020
Jeff Plotkin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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We currently use FireMon for reviewing/cleaning up rules and plan to implement policy planner by the EOY. It improves and simplifies documentation.
  • Lets you know what is unused so you can lock it down
  • Improves the process of review rules
  • Open up knowledge base on Google, to make searching easier with better results
Still learning the FireMon package, but the more I learn the better I like it. We have a small shop so I tend to jump between priorities.
Works great for our two failover pairs--this question may be better for a larger organization.
We are currently not using it for cloud support.
It save me time and I'm able to have the review - review the rule independently with using my time.
Read Jeff Plotkin's full review
December 16, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
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FireMon is being used by whole organization. It's a second source of firewall rules and we give access to people who can't be given access to firewalls to review the rules. That way many people are using FireMon.

We are also using it for Rule analysis and rule-recertification.
  • Filter search capabilties
  • Rule recertification using Policy Optimizer
  • Ease of use and interactive WEB UI
  • 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
FireMon is well suited for rule analysis and compliance
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December 23, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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FireMon is being used to monitor changes to our existing firewalls. Our firewalls consist of various Palo Alto models.
  • Easy to create custom controls.
  • Good dashboards for visibility.
  • Easy to use interface.
  • Out of the box reporting for compliance needs.
  • Navigation can be daunting for new users.
  • Not enough granularity with regards to documentation.
FireMon is best suited for change control monitoring and compliance in our organization.
FireMon has enabled us to monitor firewalls from one console, and has support for new models from Palo Alto which we currently use.
We recently expanded our FireMon infrastructure, from a one node solution to a four node highly available solution deployment on prem.
The upgrade and migration took less than a week of planning and implementation.
FireMon has helped us consolidate our firewall configurations for similar devices. This promoted consistency and compliance. Most recently, we had upgraded our Cisco Firepower devices and FireMon was instrumental in helping us consolidate our configs.
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December 21, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
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We use FireMon as a firewall configuration management tool as well as our primary software suite for responding to auditors regarding network security. Currently the product is mostly focused at the security administrator/engineer level but we have several users in less technical roles across different business units that have some limited but very useful information thanks to that extra level of deployment. This tool has been crucial in helping us keep our overall rule counts down and also restricting access to only applications that are still valid.
  • Finds overly permissive rules
  • Finds redundant rules/unused object (junk)
  • Acts as a snapshot in time config repository (backup system)
  • Helps compare configs from one day to the next to see exactly what changed and who changed it
  • The administration page alerts are pretty bad and need to be finely tuned.
  • Performance issues impacting large organizations with a massive amount of traffic passing over their firewalls
  • Cisco integration is less than Palo and Checkpoint in many areas; perhaps this is a Cisco side issue, but either way, it would be nice if all features worked with all vendors to the same degree
FireMon is very well suited to handle small to midsize networks for total configuration management/rule deployment/reporting. I think where FireMon is less suited is handling larger networks with higher amounts of traffic. To be fair to FireMon, we probably should have been informed by the original sales team (no longer with the company) that we would need more hardware in order to function properly with our network. We've had to use clever workarounds to get basic data from our devices into the product. I do not think this is a problem in all larger organizations but in ours where firewall logging accounts for most logs in the environment, we do have some issues.
I honestly do not want to comment too much on this one. In recent versions of the product, the ability to scale has been baked in, but the ease of doing so has been low enough that we have not yet committed fully to trying to scale the product in all ways possible. You can literally break out every function onto its own server(s), but it would be nice if a very powerful all-in-one box could handle the same thing for simplicity. I do believe that it could likely scale to meet any environment, but it might become a question of what you'd want to pay.
We have yet to deploy FireMon into our public or hybrid cloud strategies, nor do we really need to support many vendors on premises. Our business does have another security department that finds great benefits from the vendor-agnostic support. I have seen what the product can do, and in time, as our need to support multiple vendors across different environments increases, I have no doubt it will get the job done very well.
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December 03, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
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We use FireMon for compliance purposes. We use it to generate reports whenever a change is made to the Firewall. We can see who pushed policy in Checkpoint, what Change# it is associated with, and what was actually done compared to what the change ticket stated.
  • When working correctly, it generates reports for each firewall when a change is made.
  • It is a great tool to audit Firewall rules, redundant rules, and changes made
  • It doesn't always provide reports for when changes are made.
  • It only shows who pushed policy in the reports, not who made the actual changes to the firewall.
  • You can no longer drill down into reports at a granular level which back in Version 7 you were able to, which provided a great deal of information.
  • Seems to have some issues communicating with Checkpoint retrieving all reports that are split between two data centers.
When working correctly, it is great for audit purposes when you need to show when changes were made, what was made, who made them, and with what change. When the reports aren't working, you have to dig up all this information manually. Back in version 7, you were able to drill down in the reports that provided a very granular detailed information, now the newer version doesn't allow for this.
When working correctly, it can scale well to our environment which runs multiple Firewalls with backup Firewalls.
We use FireMon strictly for reporting purposes, only for audit reasons.
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October 14, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
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FireMon is being used within my team. It allows us to view all of our rules in one console and run queries against those rules.
  • Runs queries against existing rules.
  • Requires a lot of care and feeding, often our log collector disconnects and must be reconnected.
  • Service Packs are required to be added/updated much too often.
  • Whenever we make any changes in our firewall environment, FireMon takes a ton of time to get working properly again.
  • The canned queries are lacking, more should be added and improved.
If the information is in FireMon, I can run an unused rule report which helps with rule cleanup.
FireMon isn't an intuitive tool and wouldn't be much use across departments outside of IT.
FireMon doesn't seem to work well with CheckPoint so maybe they should focus more on a specific vendor to be sure the tool works well with one vendor before moving to the next.
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October 14, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
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FireMon is used in conjunction between the Network and Security team for security purposes like evaluating current security posture of the firewalls as far as rules and configurations in place. We are aiming to use it to automate yearly recurring review activities by our teams and to facilitate the amount of time it takes to complete them.
  • Rule review.
  • Best practice guidelines review.
  • Configuration review.
  • CIS benchmark integration would be great.
  • The reporting inside the platform is great, but the exported versions could be improved to facilitate reading and get a high summary executive view.
It is a nice monitor tool, don't expect anything more. Organisation processes are needed around its integration to enhance its use. Everything related to firewall optimization and cleanup is nicely done by FireMon, the solutions are also well presented and easy to implement. The reports are great, but it still require human interaction to fix things, don't expect the process to be automated.
We only use FireMon for on-premise purposes at the moment. I'm not aware of any initiative to take it to another level, but if there's an opportunity we're aware the solution is well suited for all our needs, regardless of the environment where it is implemented and in which it is operating.
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December 15, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
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We are primarily using FireMon for Quarterly Compliance.
  • Configuration pulls
  • Drop rule enabled
  • Change History
  • The requirement for syslogs when some of the firewalls are already displaying last hit date, etc. (palo alto)
I think the flexibility of scheduling the config pulls and the flexibility on the architecture (1 box versus as many as you want) are very nice.
We have used it across multiple vendors, but not in the cloud.
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December 04, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
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FireMon is deployed by the Corporate Security Team, the network team will check in all of their firewalls and use the tool for audit purposes. The Security Team also aligns witth each Business Unit security leader, if that BU is audited they use the data produced from FireMon as evidence.
  • Firewall Auditing
  • Reporting
  • Ease of use
  • Resources, to much minimun hardware requirements to run
  • Architecture is to big, to many endpoints to deploy
  • Hosted Cloud solution could help in place of System deployments
FireMon is a great tool, but it is very expensive to run. Also the last sale rep we had was very aggresive and didnt respect the fact we told them that we were not interested at the time to upgrade or add any additional licensing.
Scalability is great, just need to deploy a collector locally and it gooes...the main APP + DB server is a resource hog.
We [haven't] deployed FireMon to any Cloud environments currently.
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July 03, 2020
Ken Sharp | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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FireMon is used for firewall change management from request to implementation and verification. Security Manager is used extensively for policy test, and to enable cleanup and migration.
  • FireMon provides a live view in to firewalls across the enterprise in a single tool.
  • Policy Planner is customizable, and can be fit to your company's workflow requirements, to include API for Service Now.
  • FireMon provides policy testing capability, and traffic flow analysis, which is critical for timely troubleshooting.
  • The FireMon interface has evolved from a desktop client to a browser-based portal, but added many layers to navigating commands. A simpler interface with most commands and functions one click deep (and all visible) would be more efficient for daily ops workflow.
  • Policy test is great, but doesn't differentiate when a policy is a user-auth rule, so the result may show that policy is already in place, when it is actually not usable.
FireMon is very well suited for an enterprise with any number of firewalls and types. It is scalable, and can be installed as a single appliance, or distributed infrastructure, with as many data collectors as needed. It provides a view in to all firewalls at once, and enables efficient troubleshooting, policy testing, compliance analysis, and detection/validation of changes. For merge and acquisition, or spinoff, of network infrastructure, it is an extremely valuable tool for quickly documenting routes, policies, and zones to execute firewall migrations.
FireMon can be scaled, as needed, with multiple datacollectors, on-prem, or in the cloud.
We have used FireMon Policy Planner for tracking change requests to cloud firewalls and NSG.
Read Ken Sharp's full review
June 26, 2020
Daniel James | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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FireMon is actively being used by our security team to enforce oversight and compliance standards for our firewall environment. Additional business units are also leveraging the solution to help with reporting. Change management will use the tool to identify rogue changes or changes that may have been implemented outside of our internal change management guidelines. Firewall admins will use the solution to improve the quality of the rules that they generate and to assist with the review and approval workflow. Compliance leverages the solution to help prioritize which devices may need more assistance or a greater amount of overhead needed to remediate.

The main benefit at this time is that it helps us help ourselves and reduce the amount of calories we burn each month or quarter in identifying what issues we need to address in our environment. Getting ready for audit, or quarterly reviews of devices is exponentially easier. Having the ability to automate many of our controls into our workflow on an ongoing basis also reduces the amount of time spent in each of those scheduled reviews/clean up efforts.

  • BU Reporting - Concerned about role segmentation? Want other business units to peek into how things are going on your devices but without having to give everyone under the sun admin credentials for those devices? FireMon accomplishes that for us. I'm able to take this solution to various business units and shop it around...and increase its ROI by getting additional processes or procedures built around its functionality.
  • Remediation Reporting - A flexible interface allows for very granular information to be generated, exported, and manipulated. Want to export a list of expired rules, done. Rules that allow traffic but don't have logging enabled, done. Find a change that took place outside of your change window and identify who's manager to speak to - done.
  • Support - Although this isn't a "Security Manager" specific example its worth emphasizing that with such a flexible and vestal tool there are multiple ways of doing things. Usually there is the way that I can find to fit my needs right now - but the support staff have been amazing as offering improvement suggestions for the way that I use the tool to accomplish the tasks I have to complete. Quick turnaround on tickets, and no micro-managing of prerequisites before offering a to schedule a webex or best guess first step.
  • More granular documentation - A flexible tool is great, but with flexibility comes gaps in documentation. Nothing serious, but I have found myself asking questions to support on more than one occasion because I couldn't independently find the solution in the default documentation. "How can I generate a query that uses this argument rather than this one..." kinda stuff.
  • More granular ability to "whitelist" specific rules - If security teams had perfect security, the business wouldn't be allowed to operate. That being the case there will always be compromises. Although I may care about a specific control as far as my environment is concerned, I will find myself with a laundry list of rules that will take an extended effort to clean up, or there is no good way around. Being able to acknowledge these and then circle back to them at regular intervals for review would be good - as opposed to having to make sure I filter those specific rules out of larger exports that I may dump into a ticket for remediation.

Very well suited for reporting, and identifying control failures. I can single handedly do the analysis work of an entire remediation team - validate my findings - export the information in a format that is friendly to pass along to my admins - track remediation efforts - and update documentation in one interface.

There are some areas in the reporting that could be tweaked a bit to provide more nimble output. FireMon has a wide variety of pre-generated reports that have a lot of value over the query based reporting. Many of those reports you can run against your entire enterprise, but some you can't....meaning you might have to duplicate the report for a handful of devices depending on your need.

As a security professional let me first acknowledge that I know better than to say or document much in a public forum. That being said I have recently had reasons to sit down and future proof our current implementation. We're as virtual as virtual can be - if we acquired 300% of our current device load tomorrow responding to that need (aside from licensing) would just be a matter of spinning up more VM's in house, and cutting the appropriate tickets for where syslog info gets sent.
Read Daniel James's full review
August 03, 2020
jeff Reese | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
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Cybersecurity and Network departments use the product, for auditing, keeping track of changes, security, real-time change information, historic log information, dupe rules/object cleanup. and long term trend reports.
  • Correlate large rule sets and uncountable objects into a human usable format
  • Allows you to pick a supplied compliance assessment and allows you to create a custom one to fulfill your needs
  • Gives you an Enterprise dashboard with percentages that you can drill down to the devices--as the rules are constantly changing to fit business needs this helps reduce security flaws a human will miss.
  • It centers on policy, compliance, and change--the three areas we all need help in.
  • Setting up a new compliance assessment or modifying an existing one
It's a must-have tool for the security department.
You count the current and new devices for the years and you're done. Not a set as in most other applications where you buy 10, 25, or 100, and end up paying for something you are not using.
We have Fortinet, Cisco, and Palo Alto in-house, and FireMon works with all of these. We are moving into the cloud now using Palo Alto, and we don't see any Issue adding this to FireMon.
Read jeff Reese's full review
July 27, 2020
Blake Wofford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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Currently, we are using FireMon to catalogue our firewall policies, assign owners to rules, and audit those rules.
  • Policy Optimization - helping us remove shadow rules
  • Rule analysis for gaps in security
  • Unused rule identification
  • Bugs, Bugs, Bugs, Bugs, Bugs
  • Upgrades are often problematic.
  • Sometimes what the reports show isn't what's in the database.
Firewall rule analysis, removing shadow rules, finding gaps in policies are all great areas for FireMon use. We have limited use of FireMon in our organization because we don't have a good understanding of the product and its capabilities (outside of one or two individuals). It would be good for FireMon to look at our setup and advise us on what we can use it for.
Easily understanding how many firewalls, routers, switches, etc. can be used from a hardware/CPU/memory perspective has been challenging. The real reason I gave the "8" is because of all the bugs in the systems that we encounter when we upgrade. It's guaranteed we run into a minimum of two to three bugs immediately after upgrading.
We have not used that to my knowledge yet. But, I know it's coming.
Read Blake Wofford's full review
July 28, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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FireMon is used for firewall governance, including the creation of reports to satisfy PCI requirements, to identify and prioritize remediation of overly permissive rules and rulesets, and as the principal platform for performing firewall policy audits against internal standards.
  • PCI Reporting - After identifying which firewalls and rulesets are in scope, producing a report artifact to satisfy PCI requirements on Firewall reviews is literally a two-click operation.
  • Storing Rule Metadata - FireMon stores metadata (prefilled fields, standard fields, and custom fields) for each rule in each policy which is valuable for context during firewall reviews in particular
  • API - FireMon exposes most if not all of its functionality via REST API
  • FireMon does not yet support URL filtering (the identification of or implementation of) for Palo Alto firewalls
  • Direct integration with other systems takes place through workflows, which are not documented (the intent I believe is Pro Services should be engaged in order to do integrations, e.g. with ServiceNow).
I would strongly recommend FireMon for any IT/Security department that must maintain and support multiple firewall platforms. FireMon's ability to create a unified interface to view, audit, and even implement rules in a vendor-agnostic manner is excellent.

If PCI audits are an issue, and providing firewall reports for PCI is difficult, this is something FireMon solves immediately out of the box.

If a business is entirely using a single firewall platform, FireMon still provides benefits, but the recommendation would not be quite as strong depending on the capabilities of the native management platform.
With a distributed architecture available for larger deployments, FireMon is excellent at scaling during or after implementation.
We do not use multiple vendors for cloud, so I cannot speak to this aspect.
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May 31, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
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FireMon Policy Planner (version 7) is currently being used as our firewall request system across the IT organization. This allows us to have a central location for managing and tracking all firewall change requests. The workflow allows tickets to proceed through various levels of approval prior to implementation. Maintaining audit records of firewall changes is a business requirement, FireMon Security Manager (versions 7 and 8) is currently being used by our security team to satisfy audit requirements through compliance assessments and reports.
  • Version 8 addressed some shortcomings of the previous version regarding response time and administration capabilities. Reports are generated quickly and there are more customization options for administrators.
  • New dashboards provide a quick overview that is much more informative than the previous version.
  • The enterprise view is a nice way to view devices across the organization at a glance.
  • The search functionality is much improved in version 8 and allows you to search across all devices if you so choose. It is quick and has a query syntax builder that is a vast improvement over searching capabilities in version 7.
  • Creating custom controls is much better in the newer version. The syntax helper will build the correct query for you.
  • When they moved from version 7 to version 8 there were some areas that seemed neglected. The generated reports did not always render properly when viewed as a PDF, though they looked fine in HTML. Another lost function was reporting usage on NAT rules in firewalls.
  • The scheduling function for reports/assessments is not the easiest thing to find or administer. It would be nice to be able to schedule reports directly from the Security Manager without having to go to Administration.
  • I would like to see customizable reports. Right now you must create custom controls and add them to custom assessments.
  • The GUI does not always maintain your filters or settings if you drill down into an object and then return.
  • There are not always enough search filter options and they are sometimes hard to view.
  • Some reports are not very useful. It would be nice to see those re-evaluated or re-worked into a usable report.
I have found FireMon very useful for auditing, reporting, and compliance purposes. It has become a quick resource for firewall policy information across the organizational footprint. Some of the reports, particularly those with recommendations, ought to be taken with a grain of salt as the recommendations do not account for rule/object utilization or business requirements.
The current environment has not been scaled out, but replacing a data collector was relatively straightforward. I imagine it would be similar when scaling the environment to include more data collectors.
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July 24, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
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FireMon is used for tracking and reviewing firewall rules on a regular basis. It is used to save an old process of manually tracking all of the firewall rules.
  • It can be customized in a lot of ways because you can write your own queries and assign them to controls.
  • When the system has proper resources, FireMon is quite reliable and quick to pull new firewall rules.
  • The user interfaces has a lot of options to use like revisions. It is helpful to look at revisions before and after changes to make sure everything went as planned. It also has some pie graphs that are good for showing in reports.
  • There needs to be functionality to roll back changes to FireMon, or save copies of firewall documentation that can be reverted back. There are some manual fields you can fill in for firewall rules in FireMon (things such as notes about audits of the rules, when they were last audited, etc). If they are removed, there is no way to re-add them. There also needs to be an option to copy documentation from one firewall to another in case you have to RMA a firewall. I have been advised that the development team is adding these features sometime in the next year, but it has bit us a few times.
  • I get the impression that the development team needs to give better documentation to the support team.
  • No root access to the box. This has caused some issues such as not being able to eject a CD rom from a VM and not being able to install a backup client requiring us to code a backup script in house. There used to be sudo access, but it was removed.
I put 6 because I like the product when it is working well, and the majority of the department likes the product. I will rate higher when they resolve the issues that I mentioned.


It has been a year since I reviewed this product. I feel like I can bump the review up to a 8 because a lot of features are being added to the product that make things such as search queries easier to perform. I still feel like the system administration piece of Firemon needs improvement.
Note - I bumped this to a 9/10 when it was originally a 6/10. This is because they added "datacollector groups" which resolves the issue that I was complaining about when I put the 6/10.
No comment. I do not enough use w/FireMon in the cloud yet to say.
The usability is fantastic for the user.

The usability for the system administrator could be improved.
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July 22, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
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FireMon is being used for firewall optimization and activity monitoring. It also leverages the firewall operations management supporting daily operations and assisting the firewall security team focusing on the exact activities needed. Audit teams are getting the outputs of firewall operations. It’s an effective tool to be compliant with several regulations and determining which items/rules should be changed or modified to be compliant. Additional controls can be integrated throughout the firewall operations from the very beginning to the last degree. Overall solutions decrease the auditing of firewalls internally as well as externally. Hidden risks are visible through FireMon to the operation team as well as to information security and upper-level management.
  • Integration with different vendors
  • Enrichment capabilities
  • Risk analyzer
  • Global dashboard
  • Reporting features
  • GUI is somewhat cumbersome for the beginners
  • Policy planner has a lack of customization. The templates are very strict.
  • Again for the beginners, it has its own custom language and familiarization takes time.
  • Planning and deployment guide is lacking.
  • Local support should be improved or additional support options could be offered.
For a scenario with multiple firewall/security vendors with lots of devices in the company, FireMon is the perfect solution. However, in the case of having only a few devices, it’s somewhat pricey for an initial investment and in the ongoing operational costs. In the case of regulatory and compliance requirements, FireMon is very effective. If you have time to dig into software for firewall management, this product is perfect. But if you don’t have time or work with limited resources, I advise you to check the other convenient products.
It's highly scalable, multiple collectors can be set up and integrated with different vendors. With solid hardware incredible EPS rates can be achieved. Customization for device monitoring options is the key point for high EPS rates. Smart and dedicated monitoring of FireMon data collectors is a major advantage in scalability.
It's a very solid product in private networks and can also be used in public clouds. It's also effective for hybrid cloud deployments. The same security posture that aligns with private deployment can be set at the public cloud. Even if you deploy the same firewall vendors (checkpoint, Paloalto, etc.) to the cloud you get the same output. Within the usage of policy planner, you can apply the related rules wherever needed. We don’t see any difference between public or private cloud. Public cloud tags or security groups are also supported in the solution.
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July 01, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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We use FireMon Security Manager, not only for our internal FW administration but also as part of our Managed Services. More specifically, it's part of our offer for managed firewalls service. This allows us to include more task to offer in the service like periodically cleaning firewall policies and other complains repots, i.e PCI reports.
  • TFA reports - show very detailed information that allows the admin to replace a wide-open FW policy to one or several accurate and narrow FW policies.
  • Change reports - In a very simple way, shows clearly who made what change and when. Also, it's able to highlight changes made between not consecutive configurations.
  • Dashboards - Allows us to drill-down in a simple and intuitive way, find the information needed in an investigation or any other search.
  • For TFA logging if we can have more options to run to choose, not only 1 day, 1 week, 1 month.
Well suited in firewalls with legacy configurations, for companies that are PCI compliant and need specific reports for internal/external audits, or for companies with co-administration.
Less appropriate for new network and security implementations.
I'd like a better way to increase the licenses in MSSP firewall model, to manage multi-tenancy in an easy way.
For our organization, it makes a lot of sense because our expertise is not across all firewall vendors. FireMon's tools allow the analysis of the different type of FW devices
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May 18, 2020
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
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Currently, FireMon is used as an auditing tool to track all changes. Also, we use it for quarterly reviews to do rule cleanup on firewall rules. It is only being used by our IT Security Team for our firewall assets. This tool is required for record retention.
  • Tracking all changes that occur on assets.
  • Able to quickly identify duplicate or unused rules.
  • Automation and workflow.
  • Network maps have a lot of room for improvement
  • How FireMon is updated; not able to pull updates directly from the system.
FireMon is great when used with IT Security and Risk Management. It is a great tool to help quickly identify duplicate rules, rules that allow too much access, and rules that are rarely used.
It seems the scalability is pretty simple in a VM environment. However, if you have hardware appliances, you want to make sure it is futureproofed for any acquisitions or additional hardware that may come up.
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October 18, 2019
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
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FireMon is used to manage the firewalls in the organization. It allows us to view rules and configurations as well as allows us to audit it to see where we can improve the rule sets. It can also create helpful reports with great suggestions or display what you have in a nice organized fashion. Wonderful device!
  • Organized.
  • Easy to use.
  • It helps improve FWs.
  • Trying to reset forgotten passwords was sometimes difficult, the timing with technical was sometimes hard, but they were always helpful and very nice.
It's great for comparing configurations and rule sets, as well as creating reports to see where the firewalls can be improved to provide better security.
It is very easy to add or remove devices.
It did not. We only had Cisco appliances.
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April 10, 2019
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
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FireMon is a global tool that has been purchased to get a centralized view of our firewalls. This enables us to review our security posture and implement a compliance strategy with our customers.
  • Customization of reporting is a nice feature. This is not available with other similar tools in the industry.
  • Traffic Flow Analysis is widely used for looking at overly permissive rules.
  • The dashboards are simple and enable us to do a presentation for non-technical audiences.
  • The integration of firewalls is quite easy.
  • Support is fast to respond and generally knowledgeable.
  • The main area where FireMon will need improvement is a true knowledge base for customers and users. There is a lack of documentation and known facts. This means that as a user, the need for opening tickets for simple tasks is sometimes frustrating.
Connecting with individual Cisco ASA devices is a charm. It is very easy and gives all the level of data. It would be nice to have the same features with Palo Alto.
I am in an organization that spans over all continents, and this product enables me to create data collectors close to the assets without compromising effectiveness.
We are just starting to introduce AWS capabilities into our FireMon environment so I will not comment.
Read this authenticated review
April 13, 2019
Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Both the networking and security departments utilize FireMon to do configuration and rule reporting across multiple firewall products and vendors. This includes utilizing FireMon to check for changes in firewall policy or troubleshooting if a connection should be allowed/denied through multiple firewalls.
  • It finds unused or shadowed rules and shows them to you well.
  • It makes auditing of baseline standards easy.
  • Makes it easy to search across multiple firewalls.
  • Makes it easy to see if traffic should get through the firewalls.
  • Sometimes the search filter syntax doesn't make it easy to find what you are looking for. It uses its own syntax.
  • Lacks the ability to go back in time and create a compliance report from older data.
FireMon is well suited for a company with lots of varying devices with a need for standardized reporting. Its strengths shine when you want to unify your data collection and reporting in once place.
It seems that you could get to a very large and/or heterogeneous environment and it will still give you the data you need.
We utilize multiple firewall vendors and types, and FireMon presents the data the same which is very helpful for interpreting the data.
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January 25, 2019
Howard Wall | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
As the complexity of our environment has increased, we found it difficult to audit our firewalls and keep track of changes. Most importantly was the compliance aspect. Traditionally this has been done with a manual review, but as we have added firewalls and from different vendors, this had become a time-consuming process that was unsustainable. With FireMon we are able to continually audit our firewalls and flag any issues that would cause a problem with a security audit. The initial remediation was difficult, but we are now able to quickly identify any issues and get them remediated quickly. It also gives us the ability to supply reports to our auditors to address any questions they may have about the security of our network.
  • From Cisco to Palo Alto and AWS Security Groups, we are able to pull in all of this information into a centralized location. From the list of supported vendors, we feel like we are not limited to any one firewall vendor. This is very important to us as we are always looking into the best technology to support our ongoing growth.
  • The ability to create custom reports or to use the pre-built templates was a very nice feature for us, we want to make sure that our baseline is in line with the compliance standards we are audited against and go the extra mile in some cases to make sure that we are always safe. We are always confident that we are compliant across the organization with the reporting that FireMon provides.
  • As we have matured as a company we have adopted a security first policy when it comes to firewall rules. In the past firewall rules were approved and implemented without much thought given to process and tracking. With Policy Planner we are able to track those changes pre-implementation and post implementation to ensure that no changes are made without authorization and they are correctly implemented.
  • Upgrades almost always require support intervention if you're going more than a few releases newer, and even then the upgrade process could use improving. Luckily it really doesn't have to be done often if you're happy with your implementation. For us, the only reason to upgrade would be to address security with the product itself.
  • It can be a little overwhelming the first time you start to get reporting, especially if the environment has been around awhile. We had difficulty at first because we were overwhelmed by the amount of information we were seeing and we needed pro services to train our staff to use FireMon effectively. We found that even with this assistance it still took time before we were able to wrap our heads around getting everything remediated.
  • Some of the built-in templates for things such as PCI remediation are locked from changes and prevented from duplicating, we had to make our own using those standards so that we could begin reporting with it. This took a little time to do and we feel that we should be able to work with it out of the box. It wasn't a big problem but something to look out for.
You might be able to get away without using a solution like this in a smaller environment, but as you grow you will find it far more difficult to go back and remediate as we did. FireMon is best suited for an environment that has strict requirements for reporting and auditing, such as the financial sector, but really wouldn't be suitable for a small office or an industry that does not have these requirements.
It has some hefty requirements for system specs, but that's due to the firewall logging. You can have multiple nodes to distribute the load and grow as you need. We found that our initial setup went beyond what we initially needed, but we were able to see the increasing load and plan accordingly to add resources and nodes to handle the additional firewalls.
We required the ability to manage firewalls from any vendor or cloud provider, as we did not want to become dependent on any one firewall solution. It was also important because we would be using FireMon for a very long time and we did not want to change solutions for monitoring and compliance. FireMon has been great in that aspect and we are now able to automatically add new firewalls to FireMon as they are deployed to the environment.
Read Howard Wall's full review
January 16, 2019
Robert Bollinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
FireMon is being leveraged across several IT Departments, including IT Security, Risk Management, Engineering, and Architecture teams. For us, it helps across many of our business models. We are in a highly regulated industry, SOX, MICS (gaming), and PCI, to name a few. For security best practices, we leverage integrated reports to help identify unused rules and objects. From an engineering and architectural approach, we leverage anything from policy creation and optimization, to ping path analysts to make sure the correct firewalls and policies are submitted the first time. With close to 100 firewalls, this helps streamline the process.
  • Built-in compliance and security reporting - By scheduling reports, we automate the information gathered and get it to the correct department for remediation, freeing up resources for other tasks.
  • Ping Path Analysts - this plays a big help in our environment. With over 300 IT personnel, communication is sometimes lost. Changes to architecture happen frequently with our dynamic and worldwide presence, including cloud. It is important to get it right the first time, in a secure and efficient manner.
  • Security Manager - Organization, optimization, and metrics that can easily be tracked and help make future decisions on the appropriate coarse of action. For example, I've taken multiple firewalls which had high CPU and memory utilization, reprioritized the policies, and cut those metrics in half.
  • Licensing is a nightmare - Depending on the 'size' of your firewall, there are different scu's. There are also costs associated with adding router/switches, as well as centralized management.
  • System status and health - while there are ways to display the metrics, you have to go to a different URL and to each appliance. It would be nice if the manager had a health check for all of the collectors associated with it on it dashboard.
  • MFA / SSO /SAML2.0 integration - It would be valuable to integrate the before mentioned integrations for secure access and flexibility.
I think the product is well suited for an environment with multiple, complex firewall deployments. Environments that are highly regulated and a have need for automation and reporting, would gain value. However, if you are a small company, or the deployment/environment is cookie cutter, then I don't think you would be able to justify the cost.... it's not cheap!
I've had some challenges keeping this system up with the volume of traffic being sent to the collectors. We've engaged the vendor, but still have on-going issues.
Yes, we have benefited from the multiple vendor, multiple environments quite well. Using tools such as ping path analysts, we can traverse multiple vendor and infrastructures, to gather information to correctly secure and create policy before ever touching a firewall or router. We can create accurate change control and execute right the first time. This is HUGE, as we are hybrid across multiple cloud vendors around the world to our properties.
Read Robert Bollinger's full review
January 23, 2019
Johnson Ditching | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Review Source
We are a product distributor of Firemon, we were able to sell Firemon to some of our customers, from telecoms, banks and call centers. I am the one providing the walkthrough and guide the customers on how to integrate the FireMon security manager to the Firewall devices. FireMon addresses a lot of difficulties that the firewall administrator faces, a lot of firewall devices are not optimized. FireMon can help a lot on this department. Though FireMon has other add on modules from the security manager. I did not see an aggressive positioning of the other modules.
  • Configuration changes, it can monitor and alerts any change on the firewall through email alerts.
  • Optimised firewall rules , FireMon easily identify the unused firewall rules, duplicate rules, shadowed rules.
  • Traffic Flow Analysis help a lot to further discover, tightening rules such as ANY rules configured on the firewall.
  • Needs more supported devices and firewall supported vendors.
  • Needs to push other add on modules to show the full capability of the FireMon Security Manager. eg policy planner, policy optimiser, risk analysis.
  • Needs aggressive marketing in the Philippine Market. A lot of customers are not aware that there is a solution for firewall optimization and management.
  • A lot of add on features are not introduced or not being used by the customer.
Firewall rules clean up and optimisation.
I already gave a high rating the deployment for multiple firewall monitoring/ clean up can be easily setup.
Our FireMon deployment inculdes public and private firewalls, So far ithelpsp the customer to manage, monitor and do the firewall clean up. It's a disappointment since the other great features are not used greatly eg policy planner, policy optimizer and risk analysis.
Read Johnson Ditching's full review

What is FireMon?

FireMon's agile Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) platform gives security and operations teams automated visibility and analysis for network security devices. FireMon's web-based UI allows users to dissect their network security policies, locate compliance failures, and assess security vulnerabilities. The vendor says the platform proactively delivers intelligence around IT security and compliance so organizations can make better decisions about their network security.

The FireMon platform offers:

  • Real-time monitoring for security and network operations to see details in complex IT and security systems. With granular, sub-second views into the network infrastructure, FireMon provides automated analysis to improve security posture, maintain compliance and detect advanced threats.
  • Automated Security Configuration Assessments (SCA) for continuous compliance, automated rule and cleanup recommendations, and risk-based simulation for policy changes. Users can create "what if" scenarios for analysis and model the impact of potential changes. This reduces time and gives greater assurance that firewall changes provide appropriate security and accessibility to IT assets.
  • Continuous assessment of all security device configurations in real-time, complying to regulatory and internal standards. Audits are automated with sub-second analysis and documentation across the security infrastructure.

FireMon Features

Has featureKPI Dashboards: See your network at a glance with analysis, trending and key performance indicator widgets on a customizable dashboard.
Has featureTraffic Flow Analysis: Monitor network traffic behavior – down to the application level – to isolate overly permissive configurations.
Has featureAccess Path Analysis: Trace every available access path across the network and visualize relationships between network devices to identify risk access points.
Has featureNetwork Mapping: Visualize and interact with highly complex network security environments or segmentations.
Has featureChange Detection & Reporting: Isolate, document and alert on every ongoing change implemented throughout your existing firewall policies.
Has featureAssessments & Controls: Define and employ unique security controls for customized, repeatable analysis and reporting on your firewall policies.

FireMon Videos (3)

FireMon Downloadables

FireMon Integrations

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering PAN-DB, Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series, VMware NSX, VMware ESXi, Check Point Next Generation Firewall, Check Point Security Management, AhnLab TrusGuard, Check Point FireWall-1 / SmartCenter / VPN-1 Edge including VSX, Cisco ASA / PIX / FWSM / ASA Context, Dell SonicWall, F5 AFM, Fortinet Fortigate / VDOM, Huawei USG / Eduemon, Hillstone SG-6000 series, IBM Proventia MFS, Juniper Netscreen / SRX / ScreenOS / VSYS, Secui NXG / MF2, Stonesoft Management Center and detected firewalls, Topsec Firewall, WeGuardia FW

FireMon Competitors

FireMon Pricing

  • Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
  • Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
  • Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
  • Entry-level set up fee?Optional

FireMon Customer Size Distribution

Consumers
0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
8%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)
15%
Enterprises (> 500 employees)
77%

FireMon Support Options

 Free VersionPaid Version
Phone
Email
FAQ/Knowledgebase
Video Tutorials / Webinar

FireMon Technical Details

Deployment Types:On-premise, SaaS
Operating Systems: Web based browser UI
Mobile Application:No
Supported Countries:All countries except North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba
Supported Languages: English