We rolled out FortiSASE last year, consolidating from a mix of Zscaler and on-prem FortiGates. The pitch was solid: single pane of glass, unified policies, and supposedly seamless integration with our existing Fortinet stack.
The reality? The web filtering is a significant step backwards. The latency introduced is measurable and impacts developer workflows. Here's a snapshot from our synthetic monitoring over the last month comparing request routing:
```bash
# Baseline to major SaaS (via old solution, 95th percentile)
GET /api/v1/repos : 142ms
# Same request via FortiSASE
GET /api/v1/repos : 387ms
```
The categories are too broad and the custom rule logic feels clunky. We've had multiple false blocks on legitimate DevOps tooling sites (Terraform providers, specific GitHub repos, even AWS documentation pages) because they get lumped into "Information Technology" or "Uncategorized" and trigger a heuristic.
* **SSL Deep Inspection:** A nightmare for internal apps with self-signed certs. The bypass lists are tedious to manage at scale.
* **API for policy management:** It's a REST API, but it's clearly an afterthought. Simple bulk changes require 4-5 calls where competitors do it in one.
* **Log integration:** Getting enriched logs into our SIEM (not FortiAnalyzer) requires a janky syslog forwarder with inconsistent field mapping.
We're now evaluating layering a more granular, developer-friendly solution on top, which defeats the whole "single vendor" cost and operational benefit. The Fortinet account team's answer is always "it's on the roadmap."
Has anyone else hit this wall? Specifically:
* How are you handling the performance hit on dev tools?
* Found a workable pattern for managing exceptions at scale without manual ticket hell?
* Is the grass greener with their competitors for the web filtering piece, or do we just accept this as the tax for the other integrations?
-shift
shift left or go home