Monitoring the Fortigate Firewall v4 (and above)

Figure 1 below depicts the  Fortigate Firewall monitoring model offered out-of-the-box by the eG Enterprise. As stated earlier, this model focuses on the overall health of the FortiGate Firewall v4 (and its variants).  

Figure 1 : Layer model of the FortiGate Firewall

Every layer displayed by Figure 1 is mapped to a series of tests, which when executed on the firewall reveals a wealth of performance information pertaining to the firewall. These statistics provide quick and accurate answers to the following frequently asked performance-oriented questions:

  • Has the firewall been consuming excessive CPU, memory, and disk resources?
  • Are too many sessions currently active on the firewall?
  • Is the network and data traffic on the firewall cluster unit very heavy?
  • How effective are the anti-virus and IPS mechanisms configured on the firewall cluster unit? Have they been able to detect and prevent all attempted attacks?
  • How many packets and data was transmitted/received (processed) for each firewall policy configured on the FortiGate firewall?
  • How many intrusions were detected and blocked by the firewall?
  • Were signature intrusions detected? If so, how many signature intrusions were detected by the firewall?
  • How many HTTP/HTTPS URLs were blocked?
  • How many cookies were blocked altogether?
  • How many HTTP/HTTPS requests were examined and sent through the web content filter?
  • How many HTTP/HTTPS requests were blocked by the web content filter of the firewall?
  • What is the current state of each VPN tunnel?
  • How well data was transmitted/received through each VPN tunnel?
  • What is the current state of each SSL VPN tunnel?
  • How many users were logged in through the SSL VPN?
  • How many users are currently active on each SSL VPN tunnel?
  • How many sessions are currently active on each SSL VPN tunnel?
  • What is the rate at which data was transmitted/received for each user through the SSL VPN using the tunnel mode?
  • How many users are currently logged in through the SSL VPN using tunnel mode?
  • How many users actually logged out of the SSL VPN?
  • How many users were registered on the firewall?
  • How many users were enabled on the firewall and how many users were actually disabled on the firewall?
  • How well memory was utilized by each proxy server on the firewall?
  • How many connections were utilized by each proxy server connection?
  • What is the maximum number of connection supported by each proxy server?
  • How many files were scanned by each scan unit of the firewall?
  • How many peer-to-peer connections were blocked and how well data was transmitted using peer-to-peer protocol?
  • How well the CPU was utilized by each processor of the firewall?
  • How many messages were processed for the Instant Messenger protocol?
  • How many files were transferred using the Instant Messenger protocol and how many files were blocked?
  • How many connections were blocked while using the Instant messenger protocol?
  • How many VOIP connections were currently active on the firewall and how many VOIP connections were blocked?