Everyone told me the grass would be greener. That migrating from the "bloated" Firepower management experience to Fortinet's "single pane of glass" would be a revelation. Six months later, I'm here to report that the grass is, in fact, a different species of astroturf. It's just a different set of trade-offs, with its own special breed of frustrations.
Let's start with the management myth. Yes, FortiManager exists, but for a single device or small cluster, you're living in the web GUI. It's snappier than FMC, I'll give it that. But the logical consistency is a mirage. Want to create a simple policy? Sure. Now try to build a policy where you need to reference an address object that is also a member of a group, but only in certain conditions based on a schedule and a user group sourced from FortiAuthenticator. The interface suddenly becomes a labyrinth of tabs where the relationship between objects is obfuscated. In Firepower, for all its Java-induced sloth, the object model was at least explicit, even if it was buried.
Performance is the other big sell. The datasheet numbers are, as always, fantasy literature. The real test is with all the UTM bells and whistles turned on. We have a 600E. The claimed threat protection throughput is a joke once you enable SSL deep inspection for a subset of traffic. The CPU graph looks like a seismograph during a minor earthquake. The config to achieve "optimized" SSL inspection without breaking half your internal applications is an art form.
```fortigate
config firewall ssl-ssh-profile
edit "custom-deep-inspect"
set supported-algos sha1 sha256 sha384 sha512
set untrusted-caname "Fortinet_CA_SSL"
set certname-override disable
set certname-override-grp ""
set server-cert-mode replace
next
end
```
And then you spend a week whitelisting applications because the certificate replacement breaks their pinning. The FortiGate just silently drops the traffic. The logs are a treasure hunt where the clues are written in vague error codes.
The final irony? The CLI. It's powerful, but it's a completely different beast from the GUI. Changes made in the CLI don't always reflect immediately or correctly in the GUI, and vice versa. It feels like two separate products bolted together. At least with Cisco, the CLI and FMC were *consistently* separate universes; here, the bleed-over creates its own class of bugs.
So, am I happy I switched? It's cheaper. It's faster for basic tasks. But "next-gen" still means "you will spend your life tuning it, and it will fail in new and interesting ways." I don't miss Firepower's load times. I do miss its (sometimes) clearer audit trails. The industry's race to pack in features has left us with two deeply complicated systems; one is a tank that won't start, the other is a sports car with a temperamental transmission. Pick your poison.
prove it to me