FDM 6.3 impressions

[Chess Norris]

Just finished the Firepower 6.3 lab in dCloud and I have to say that I am impressed by FDM . This is what Firepower should have looked from the beginning in my opinion. It feels snappy and fresh and most of the functions from FMC like VPN and H/A have been implemented in FDM now.

Apart from reporting, is there any other major things we will miss from the FMC? I am thinking of recommend  FDM for small customers that just needs a simple fail-over setup.

[Marvin Rhoads]

There's still no historical reporting - you can only see the most recent connections since they aren't being stored in a database like they are in FMC.

[Rahul Govindan]

@Chess Norris I agree. I have been playing around with 6.4 Beta image and I can say that it has become way better. Config push happens almost instantaneously in some cases compared to the few minute wait I am used to these days. And there are a good bunch of features added in 6.3 and 6.4 that would make is suitable for smaller deployments.

Analysis and Reporting are the main advantages that FMC has over FDM. But if you are sending logs to an external server for analysis, then this is not a major loss.