How PRTG works as a firewall analyzer
PRTG makes analyzing firewalls easy
Custom alerts and data visualization make it easy to monitor, identify, and prevent firewall issues.
4 reasons why to choose PRTG as your firewall analyzer
How PRTG defines sensors
In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, e.g. the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, the free space of a disk drive. On average you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.
High compatibility
Paessler PRTG comes with more than 250 preconfigured sensors for monitoring many devices out-of-the-box, including sensors for the most popular firewall vendors. You can monitor and analyze, for example, Cisco, Juniper, SonicWall, Sophos, Fortinet, Barracuda, and many other firewalls. In fact, you can monitor practically any SNMP-compatible device with our SNMP sensors.
Easier maintenance
An outdated firewall might as well be a dead firewall. PRTG can help you with update monitoring, which helps you ensure that your firewall is running with the latest patches. The same goes for firewall hardware that might be too old to work properly. With PRTG, you can easily keep an eye on the health of your hardware and make sure that you react before a firewall goes down completely.
Better observability
With PRTG, you get one central monitoring tool for your firewalls, servers, routers, switches, applications, services, and many more – PRTG monitors your entire network and displays it in easy-to-read dashboards. What’s more: with our different user interfaces for web, desktop, or smartphone, you can easily view and analyze collected monitoring data the way you like.
Saves time and money
Benefit from our automatic network discovery as well as preconfigured PRTG sensors and device templates for quick & easy installation, setup, and integration of devices, applications & more. This way, you not only save time and effort, but also money: there is no need to invest in many monitoring tools from multiple vendors when you can do it all with our firewall analyzer PRTG.
What firewall analysis looks like in PRTG
Diagnose network issues by continuously monitoring & analyzing your firewalls. Show firewall health, availability, and performance in real time and visualize data in graphic maps & dashboards to identify problems more easily. Gain the visibility you need to troubleshoot firewall issues.
Start firewall analysis with PRTG and see how it can make your network more reliable and your job easier.
PRTG is compatible with all major vendors, products, and systems
Our PRTG firewall analyzer has got you covered
Real-time availability for any firewall
Firewalls are attacked countless times each and every day. As an administrator, you must be notified immediately if your firewall is down to be able to quickly determine the cause of an interruption and what is needed to get the firewall back up.
For monitoring the availability of your firewalls in real time, just use the Ping v2 sensor in PRTG. This sensor reports average, minimum, and maximum response times to a specific IP address as well as packet loss in percent, which is useful to identify connectivity issues.
Set up custom alerts for different escalation scenarios using granular notification triggers and choose from various notification methods to be notified the way you want to – for example via email, SMS, push notification, Teams message, sound, and more.
Comprehensive firewall traffic analysis
Flow-based monitoring is a powerful way to get detailed information about the traffic on your switches and firewalls. It not only delivers information about the amount of data that flows through your devices, but also what kind of traffic it is, where it comes from, and where it goes to.
PRTG has native sensors for NetFlow v5, NetFlow v9, sFlow, and jFlow v5.
But even if your device does not support flow monitoring, PRTG has got you covered: just use the SNMP Traffic and the Packet Sniffer sensor to get the information you need.
Out-of-the-box FortiGate monitoring
Fortinet has a strong presence in the security appliances market with their FortiGate firewalls. PRTG has two built-in sensors for monitoring these devices:
The FortiGate System Statistics sensor measures CPU and memory usage, the number of sessions, the session rate, and the system uptime status. It can also determine if the device is in "conserve" mode, a self-protection measure that is activated when the system detects memory shortage.
The FortiGate VPN Overview sensor (in beta status) helps you track your VPN connections. If one of them goes down, you will know it. Monitoring metrics include the number of connected SSL clients and the number of IPSec tunnels that are up or down.
Built-in SonicWall monitoring
PRTG also comes with two built-in sensors for monitoring SonicWall devices, the SNMP SonicWall System Health and the SNMP SonicWall VPN Traffic sensor. Both sensors use SNMP to collect data from your devices.
The SNMP SonicWall System Health sensor helps you keep an eye on the overall health of your firewall, including CPU usage, memory usage, and connection cache usage.
The SNMP SonicWall VPN Traffic sensor gives you an overview of the IPsec VPN traffic on your SonicWall device such as the number of encrypted and decrypted packets per second and ingoing/outgoing fragmented packets per second.
PRTG makes your job easier
Our monitoring software frees you to focus on other tasks by promptly notifying you of potential issues.
Save effort
PRTG gives you one central monitoring tool for your servers and entire network. Enjoy a quick overview of your whole infrastructure via our dashboard and app.
Save time
Getting started with PRTG is a breeze. Setting up or switching from another network monitoring tool is easy thanks to the auto-discovery and pre-configured device templates.
Save money
80% of our customers report substantial cost savings with network monitoring. Your costs of licenses will likely pay for themselves within weeks.
Easily find the source of the problem with our PRTG firewall analyzer
Real-time alerts and custom notifications make it easy to solve issues with your firewalls.
Create innovative solutions with Paessler’s partners
Partnering with innovative vendors, Paessler unleashes synergies to create
new and additional benefits for joined customers.
Firewall analyzer: FAQ
1. What is a firewall analyzer?
A firewall analyzer is a tool that can help you gather information about the health, status, and performance of your network firewalls. With a firewall analysis software, you can not only check if your firewalls are up or down, but also get insights like unusual network activity, users and connections that need a lot of bandwidth, the most used protocols, and more.
For more than 30 years, firewalls have been one of the main tools available to sysadmins to secure their networks, devices, users, and sensitive information. They not only protect against DDoS and intrusion attacks by malicious parties, avoiding service interruptions that can paralyze the company, but also help avoid the theft of data.
In the wrong hands, information like company figures and future plans can have unforeseeable business consequences. And with legislation like the GDPR in Europe, the leakage of customer records can result in heavy fines and legal repercussions, both for the companies and even the executives in charge.
Therefore, it is all the more important that your firewalls work without interruption and that you keep an eye on your firewalls at all times using a firewall analyzer tool like PRTG to monitor traffic and user behavior to detect, prevent, and mitigate threats.
2. Why is firewall analysis important?
There are different reasons why monitoring & analyzing firewalls is important, for example:
- To identify security vulnerabilities like unauthorized access attempts, malicious traffic, and other potential security risks that could be exploited by criminals.
- To prevent data breaches by identifying and blocking suspicious traffic before it reaches a company's network.
- To ensure compliance with security standards like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which may be essential in your line of business.
- To gain visibility into network traffic patterns, user behavior, and application usage, for example, if users are trying to run servers or services forbidden by corporate policy.
- To optimize network performance by identifying traffic bottlenecks or misconfigured rules that could be impacting network throughput.
3. How to choose a firewall analysis tool?
There are 5 main features you need to look out for when choosing a firewall analyzer solution. With PRTG, you can have all of them:
- Out-of-the-box compatibility with the main firewall vendors on the market
- The capability to monitor & analyze many different parameters in one tool
- A centralized display of information from many sensors for better observability
- Customizable alerts and automated notifications when alerts are triggered
- Native and automated reporting features for different target audiences
Easily find the source of the problem with our PRTG firewall analyzer
Real-time alerts and custom notifications make it easy to solve issues with your firewalls.
More than just a monitoring tool:
Reasons our customers love PRTG
PRTG: The multi-tool for sysadmins
Adapt PRTG individually and dynamically to your needs and rely on a strong API:- HTTP API: Access monitoring data and manipulate monitoring objects via HTTP requests
- Custom sensors: Create your own PRTG sensors for customized monitoring
- Custom notifications: Create your own notifications and send action triggers to external systems
- REST Custom sensor: Monitor almost everything that provides data in XML or JSON format
Paessler PRTG is used by companies of all sizes. Sysadmins love PRTG because it makes their job a whole lot easier. Bandwidth, servers, virtual environments, websites, VoIP services – PRTG keeps an eye on your entire network. Everyone has different monitoring needs. That’s why we let you try PRTG for free.Still not convinced?
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PRTG |
Network Monitoring Software - Version 24.3.98.1210 (July 31st, 2024) |
Hosting |
Download for Windows and cloud-based version PRTG Hosted Monitor available |
Languages |
English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese |
Pricing |
Up to 100 sensors for free (Price List) |
Unified Monitoring |
Network devices, bandwidth, servers, applications, virtual environments, remote systems, IoT, and more |
Supported Vendors & Applications |
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