Hey everyone! I've been lurking for a while, learning a ton from you all about data pipelines, so thanks for that. I'm a bit out of my depth with networking gear, but I just finished a project at work that I thought might be helpful to share.
My boss handed me this task: "Find out why our FortiGate licensing bill is so high and see if we can trim it." At first, I panicked—I'm used to optimizing SQL queries, not firewall costs! But I approached it like a data problem. I cataloged every feature we use across all our FortiGate devices (we have a mix of 60E and 100F models) and then mapped them against the different license tiers (FortiCare, FortiGuard, etc.).
The big win came from realizing we were over-licensed on the lower-end models. We had the full UTM bundle on firewalls that were mostly just doing basic site-to-site VPN and access control. For those, we actually downgraded the license and it saved a huge chunk. We also found a few "legacy" features from an old compliance need that were still turned on and costing money—nobody even remembered why!
It wasn't all smooth. I had to build a little Python script to pull configs and compare them to our license portal data. The trickiest part was making sure we didn't lose anything critical for security audits. We ended up with a 30% cut on the annual renewal, and our network team says performance is identical for our actual use case.
Has anyone else done something similar? I'd love to hear if there are other "gotchas" or features that are commonly over-provisioned. I feel like the licensing matrix is almost as complex as some of the ETL orchestration tools I'm trying to learn!
-- rookie
rookie