Picture this: your network firewall is humming along, logs spilling out faster than you can scroll, while your application monitoring dashboard pleads for context. You have FortiGate guarding the gate, and New Relic watching the courtyard. But between them lies a communication gap—a place where visibility dies. Let’s fix that.
FortiGate specializes in enforcing network perimeter security. It handles traffic inspection, threat prevention, and identity-based rules. New Relic, meanwhile, is a deep observability platform built to measure everything from API latency to CPU load. When FortiGate and New Relic work together, your team sees not just what happened, but why it happened, tied to real sessions, real users, and actual security posture.
At the core of this integration is log streaming and event normalization. FortiGate can forward structured syslog data or exported metrics into a collector. New Relic ingests those events, tagging each with metadata like source IP, policy ID, and application. The result is unified visibility: every blocked request appears next to the relevant dashboard spike. You get fewer blind spots, faster correlation, and cleaner incident reviews.
How do I connect FortiGate to New Relic?
You enable FortiGate’s log forwarding through HTTPS or UDP, point it to New Relic’s ingest endpoint, and configure New Relic to parse Fortinet fields via its infrastructure agent or custom event type. Once forwarded, you can create dashboards showing threat counts, VPN sessions, or intrusion events side-by-side with your application performance data.
A few best practices go a long way:
- Map FortiGate’s roles to consistent account identities in your IdP, such as Okta or AWS IAM.
- Rotate API keys frequently, especially those handling syslog ingestion.
- Filter out non-critical traffic to reduce noise and improve dashboard accuracy.
- Validate the log sample in New Relic using the query builder before automating it.
When done right, the benefits stack up fast:
- Real-time visibility from network edge to application layer.
- Faster root cause analysis during outages or intrusion events.
- Easier compliance validation against SOC 2 and ISO controls.
- Operational clarity across hybrid or multi-cloud setups.
- Reduced debugging time for DevOps and SecOps alike.
For developers, this integration removes the time sink of manual log chasing. The network, performance, and user metrics live in the same pane. Approval delays shrink, alerts become actionable, and onboarding new environments feels less like ritual and more like a workflow.
Platforms like hoop.dev turn those access rules into guardrails that enforce policy automatically. Instead of relying on firewall admins and manual scripts, your teams can work inside a consistent identity-aware framework that connects FortiGate, monitoring, and secure access in minutes.
As AI agents increasingly assist with observability and response automation, feeding them correlated FortiGate-New Relic data eliminates guesswork. They get context right from the perimeter to the app, and you keep auditability intact without exposing sensitive payloads.
FortiGate and New Relic are powerful alone, but unstoppable together. With careful setup, you move from fragmented alerts to true intelligence—security that moves at the same speed as development.
See an Environment Agnostic Identity-Aware Proxy in action with hoop.dev. Deploy it, connect your identity provider, and watch it protect your endpoints everywhere—live in minutes.