Comparing indeni and Check Point’s SmartView Monitor
Notice: This blog post was originally published on Indeni before its acquisition by BlueCat.
The content reflects the expertise and perspectives of the Indeni team at the time of writing. While some references may be outdated, the insights remain valuable. For the latest updates and solutions, explore the rest of our blog
Key takeawaysThis key takeaway was generated through LLMs crawling the page and coming up with an overview of the content.Check Point's SmartView Monitor provides basic, high-level visibility into firewall operational health such as gateway up/down status, CPU/memory utilization, VPN tunnel status, and Cooperative Enforcement, which is helpful for general monitoring. However, for networks running critical business services where uptime and proactive issue resolution are essential, indeni offers deeper, automated analysis across Check Point gateways and management servers to detect complex and emerging issues that SmartView Monitor cannot reveal. By correlating configuration, logs, and runtime parameters and leveraging shared customer-sourced knowledge via indeni Insight, indeni uncovers specific faults (for example NIC errors, kernel table limits, DNS/NTP failures, cluster inconsistencies, and memory root causes) enabling teams to remediate problems before they impact operations.
What types of issues can indeni detect in Check Point firewalls that SmartView Monitor typically misses?
indeni detects a wide range of detailed operational and configuration problems that SmartView Monitor does not surface. Examples include gateways unable to access certificate authorities, policy installations causing high CPU load, firewall kernel or connection table limits approaching or reached, NIC errors and recently failed NICs, packet drops or transmission errors tied to specific SAs, ARP or routing table inconsistencies between cluster members, DNS resolution failures or slow DNS responses, NTP servers configured but unreachable, and unusual drops in RX traffic after failover suggesting ARP issues. indeni also pinpoints high memory usage causes and identifies cluster members in critical states, enabling precise troubleshooting beyond basic up/down and utilization metrics.
How does indeni provide proactive insights and benefit multiple Check Point customers?
indeni combines automated analysis of firewall configuration, logs, and runtime parameters with a shared knowledgebase called indeni Insight. When a Check Point customer encounters and reports an issue, that diagnostic knowledge is added to the Insight repository so other indeni customers immediately benefit from the same detection and remediation guidance. This crowd-sourced intelligence plus indeni’s ability to run complex checks allows it to surface emerging or obscure problems—such as kernel table exhaustion, NIC duplex/speed mismatches, or cluster routing differences—so teams can remediate before those issues escalate and affect critical business services.
When should an organization consider using indeni instead of relying solely on SmartView Monitor?
Organizations should consider indeni when their networks support critical business services and firewall uptime and performance directly impact operations. If basic monitoring (gateway status, CPU/memory, VPN counts) is insufficient to detect root causes or emerging risks, indeni’s deeper analysis is appropriate—especially where proactive detection of kernel/connection table limits, NIC failures or errors, cluster inconsistencies, DNS/NTP failures, and policy-related CPU spikes matters. indeni is designed to uncover complex, hard-to-detect conditions and provide actionable guidance informed by a shared customer knowledgebase, enabling teams to find and fix issues before they cause outages.
The summary:
Check Point’s SmartView Monitor is great as a basic tool for identifying the operational health of your firewalls. However, if your network is supporting critical business services and you rely on your firewalls’ uptime to succeed, you need something more capable. indeni provides you with the ability to stay ahead of possible issues in your Check Point firewalls, as well as other devices.
Therefore, if you need in-depth insight into your Check Point firewalls and management servers’ operational health, you need indeni.
The longer version:
From checkpoint.com: “SmartView Monitor is a high-performance network and security analysis system that helps you easily administer your network by establishing work habits based on learned system resource patterns. Based on Check Point’s Security Management Architecture, SmartView Monitor provides a single, central interface for monitoring network activity and performance of Check Point Software Blades.”
If you dig deeper into what SmartView Monitor helps you see, you’ll find:
- Gateway general health information (up/down, cluster fail over, CPU/memory utilization, operating system in use)
- Traffic counters
- Status of VPN tunnels
- Remote users connected via VPN (such as SecuRemote)
- Status of Cooperative Enforcement (Check Point’s NAC solution)
This is sufficient if all you are looking for is the basic health of the firewall. The vast majority of issues, however, cannot be uncovered in this way. SmartView Monitor (also known as RTM), wasn’t constructed to dig deep into the operational health of firewalls. In comparison, here’s a partial list of what indeni can help you uncover:
- Gateway cannot access certificate authority
- Policy installation resulted in high CPU load cluster may failover
- Firewall log file increase rate critical – possible connectivity loss to log server
- Firewall kernel table limit approaching or reached
- ClusterXL member is in a critical state
- Cluster member down due to NIC error
- Some received packets have been dropped by NIC (SA#24915)
- High memory usage (including pin-pointing the cause for the memory usage)
- DNS servers configured but responding too slowly
- Use of NTP servers configured but not operational
- Firewall Connection Table Limit Approaching or Reached
- A NIC has failed recently (SA#24915)
- RX traffic drastically reduced post fail over possible ARP issue
- Two cluster members differ in their routing tables (SA#66322)
- DNS server resolution test failed
- NAT connections (fwx_alloc) table limit approaching or reached
- Errors have been found in packets transmitted by NIC (SA#24915)
- ARP table is approaching its limits (SA#25890)
- VPN gateway is dropping unexpected packets (SA#22255)
- NIC duplex set to half with speed of 10mbps or 100mbps (SA#24967)
The ability of indeni to run such a complicated analysis of the firewalls’ configuration, logs and running parameter, is what allows for these issues to be uncovered. In addition, indeni leverages the world’s knowledge, via indeni Insight. This means that when a given Check Point customer runs into a certain issue and shares it with indeni, all of the other customers benefit.
The bottom line:
Check Point’s SmartView Monitor is great, albeit fairly limited in depth. indeni provides you with far greater insight into the health of your firewalls, and as a result, true proactivity. With indeni, you will solve issues before they even happen.
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