SCM Essentials Questions

[nwnetadmin]

I am getting started with Strata Cloud Manager Essentials. I only have 3 firewalls. a 220, a 440, and an 820, but I am hoping to have get more and I want to do a better job managing what I have in less time. I had a few questions...

This is what I want to do with it:

- Get an overall health picture of my firewalls. Identify high CPU, abnormal activity

- Highlight if I am too far behind on the updates, or if I am running an update with a known issue.

- Identify gaps or misconfiguration that might leave me vulnerable.

- Backup configurations

At some point, it might be nice to centralize some of the configuration. For example, if I define a host or add a URL to a category, it might be nice to keep those consistent across all firewalls.

Most of all, I am trying to learn a better way of doing things and I think that SCM essentials is a good start for that. So, to some degree, I am open to the "you'll see when you get it" concept.

What I don't want to do is force configuration changes once I register a firewall. I've got my SCM tenant activated. But, when I went to add a device I started thinking "what if this applies a different config". I wouldn't think it wouldn't do that, but I wanted to make sure.

So, I should be able to connect my firewall to SCM without changing any of the configurations around setup, ip addressing, VPNs, network policies, etc?

Any other pitfalls that I should be aware of?

[nwnetadmin]

One more question..... I also have a 4th firewall, a 220, which isn't in production and not in use. But, it isn't in support. Should I be able to activate with SCM essentials? Or, do they have to to have a support license?