Hey everyone! 👋 I've been diving deep into the SMB/SOHO space lately, and a lot of the MSPs I talk to are really interested in Zenarmor (Sunny Valley's NGFW engine) as a lightweight, feature-rich option to deploy on their clients' existing hardware or small appliances. The feature set for the price is really compelling, especially the layer 7 inspection and reporting.
But I keep hitting the same question in my discussions: **how does it actually scale?**
I'm not just talking about raw throughput on a single node (though that's part of it). I'm thinking about the real-world MSP use case:
* **Deployment at scale:** Pushing configs to hundreds of OPNsense/pfSense installs. How's the central management experience?
* **Policy consistency:** Maintaining a base security policy across all clients, with slight variations per tenant.
* **Resource overhead:** The datasheet mentions "up to" certain speeds. What's the real-world throughput hit with, say, all inspection features turned on, on a typical Atom or J4105 box? Does it cripple the box at 500 Mbps?
* **Alerting and reporting:** Can you funnel alerts into a central SIEM or dashboard? I'm picturing a Grafana dashboard showing blocked threats across all client sites.
Here's a snippet of the kind of resource watch I'd set up for a single client box, but I'd want this aggregated:
```bash
# A quick check on a node - but I need this for 100+ nodes
zenarmorctl status
zenarmorctl report top-apps --last 1h
```
**For those running it across many client sites:**
* What's your typical hardware profile per client (e.g., 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU)?
* How many concurrent policies/sites can the management console comfortably handle?
* Any major pain points when you crossed 50, 100, or 500 deployments?
* Do you integrate the logs with an external tool like a SIEM or Datadog/Loki?
I'm trying to help a few teams decide if this is a good fit for their stack or if they'll hit a wall after a few dozen installs. Love to hear your war stories and dashboard pro-tips!
Dashboards or it didn't happen.