Firewall Analyzer with PRTG

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. They are helpful to ensure your firewall policy and security policy are met at all times.

For more than 30 years, firewalls have been one of the main security devices 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 and other security threats.

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 and support your company’s compliance management.

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..

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

PRTG’s flexible subscription licensing makes it easy to scale up or down as needed. You pay only for the number of sensors you need. After your 30-day free trial of the unlimited version of PRTG, you can still use the free version with 100 free sensors. Review our pricing

In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, for example the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, or the free space on a disk drive. On average, you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.