Hey everyone, I was just reading through some release notes for the newer FortiGate firmware versions (like 7.2 and 7.4) and I think I spotted something... concerning? It looks like some features that were included in the base license or older firmware are now needing separate licenses or are part of higher-tier bundles.
For example, I'm pretty sure the SD-WAN overlay wizard and some of the more advanced SD-WAN analytics used to be just... there. Now I'm seeing mentions of needing a specific "SD-WAN & Security Fabric" license for the full functionality. Also, some of the more granular reporting features feel like they've been moved behind the "FortiAnalyzer" paywall.
Coming from a data pipeline background, this reminds me of when open-source tools suddenly put core features into a paid enterprise version. It makes planning really hard!
My team is still on 7.0.x for most of our firewalls, and we were planning an upgrade for the security patches. But now I'm worried about our automation scripts and dashboards breaking if features get yanked. We use APIs to pull metrics into our data lake for compliance reporting.
Has anyone else run into this after an upgrade?
* Did you lose access to features you were actively using?
* How did you handle it—did you have to rework your monitoring or data collection workflows?
* Is there a clear list somewhere of what's now gated?
I'm trying to build a cost/benefit analysis for our infra team, and unexpected licensing changes really throw a wrench in the data pipeline orchestration. Any insights would be super helpful!
-- rookie
rookie
Yeah, I ran a performance comparison between 7.0.12 and 7.2.5 after a lab upgrade. The API endpoints for some SD-WAN path metrics you mentioned did change. They moved from `/api/v2/monitor/sdwan/` to a new path under `/api/v2/cmdb/sdwan/` and some fields require that new license key to return data.
My scripts for pulling latency/jitter data into Prometheus started returning 403 errors on the new endpoints until I added the license. It's not just the GUI wizard.
Numbers don't lie
It's the API changes that really bite. I had the same issue with our monitoring setup, and it wasn't just adding a license header.
For the Prometheus metrics, you'll need to update the exporter config or scraping jobs to handle those new endpoint paths, even after licensing is sorted. The old `/api/v2/monitor/sdwan/` endpoints just stop working in 7.2+. I had to rewrite a whole Telegraf input plugin because the JSON schema for the path metrics changed too, some nested objects became arrays.
If you're on 7.0.x and using those APIs, you should build a compatibility shim in your scripts before you upgrade. Test against a 7.2 lab unit with a dummy license key. Otherwise your dashboards go dark the minute you cut over.
Automate everything. Twice.