FireMon announced an update to the Security Manager platform that provides more visibility and insight into the behavior of traffic on the network, and expanded analysis/reporting through a Web-based dashboard, powered by a domain-specific query language.

These capabilities, combined with FireMon's risk analysis and policy and configuration management, further extend the company's unparalleled ability to strengthen both operational effectiveness and security posture.

New capabilities allow operations and security personnel to drill deeper and better understand packet behavior and outlying device or policy factors that can affect security posture or performance. Highlights include:

FireMon Access Path Analysis – Taking advantage of FireMon's patent-pending behavior analysis framework, IT personnel can both proactively predict and forensically record the flow of packets through network configurations and obtain detailed path analysis – including routes, interfaces, firewall and NAT rules that a packet encounters while traversing the network. This allows more effective risk analysis and better informed remediation activities.

FireMon Insight – Combines a powerful Web-based Dashboard with a new FireMon Query Language (FMQL) to enable an unprecedented ability to visualize the current state of network and security configuration. FMQL enables rapid, ad-hoc queries and audit checks to retrieve information from the configurations, changes and usage analysis stored by Security Manager. It also allows for widget creation to automate searches and encapsulate results into reporting.

"Security is no longer just about finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, it’s also about using other sources of information to determine if what you found in the acres of hay is indeed a needle,” said Greg Young, Research VP at Gartner. “This requires products that help security operators, not just burying them under more information of dubious quality."

Notably, the company also today introduced a RESTful interface for Security Manager and a Device Pack Framework to allow for the rapid development of support for new and custom devices. The integration potential of the new interface also provides a gateway for FireMon innovations to be leveraged by, and extended to affect, the security posture of next-generation network architectures such as software-defined networks (SDNs).