Fortinet FortiDirector
Intelligent ADC Service

Features:

Integrates with any server, service, CDN, etc.

• Dual HTTP 302 redirects and DNS ADC
• DNS and HTTP criteria: ASN, IP(CIDR), Geo, date/timerange, daily schedule, monthly schedule
• HTTP criterion: URL pattern matching
• Primary and failover delivery actions
• Even, weighted and auto-weighted delivery strategies
• Can balance any protocol using DNS rules
• Rules cloning/inheriting capability

Highly configurable health-checking backend

• HTTP, DNS, TCP, ICMP
• Configure polling intervals, geography, up and down thresholds

Extensive notification system: email, SMS, HTTP POST

Powerful analytics:

• Hits by delivery resources, rules
• Geo, ASN, browsers breakdown

All graphs exportable as CSVs

• Complete API support
• Get/clone/edit/delete FortiDirector rule sets
• Get traffic statistics: hits, traffic Integrate into your caching management and monitoring platforms

Service specifications

Any protocol load balancing: All protocols and traffic types cannot be load balanced the same way — some demand the low latency or protocol independence of DNS load balancing, whereas some require specific capabilities only brought by HTTP load balancing. The FortiDirector Service offers both.

DNS: Can be used to load balance any protocol: from live video streaming to application-specific protocols. Also the preferred load balancing method for smaller assets such as thumbnails suffering from HTTP 302 redirections.

HTTP: Perfectly fit for large objects such as video when connection time is not the limiting factor. Also handy when load balancing needs to be based on HTTP-specific parameters such as the URL.

Any criteria load balancing

FortiDirector implements unique types of criteria to mix-and-match into load balancing rules, answering the most intricate requirements of your infrastructure strategy.

Network-based conditions: Match against requester’s IP address, CIDR block, and last mile provider (through AS Numbers) to trigger source-network based responses.

Geography-based conditions: Generate DNS or HTTP responses that are based on your requesting user’s geography: region, country, state and metro granularity available!

Time-based conditions: Whether based on specific dates and times or a daily, weekly and monthly time schedule, you can factor time into your load balancing rules.

Use HTTP-specific conditions: Match strings within the content URL to trigger differentiated responses.

Stateful load balancing

Allow your FortiDirector traffic management rules to react to the changing status of your infrastructure resources. Get extensive health reports and integrate your FortiDirector failover strategy to your existing business processes and systems.

Global health-checking nodes: San Jose, Chicago, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore.

Wide variety of health-checks: DNS, TCP, HTTP, ping or even remote script call.

Custom set thresholds: %node until down, #retries before down, #retries before UP.

Extensive alerting: Email, SMS, HTTP Post to your monitoring system.

Accommodate any load balancing scenario

Get fine-grain control on the proportion of requests that are routed to all elements of your infrastructure. You configure proportions and the behavior in case of failure of any of your delivery clouds: redistribute to the remaining resources or failover dedicated ones.

FortiDirector Monitoring Service

Don’t need redirection and failover, but want robust, reliable and real-time network resource monitoring? The FortiDirector Monitoring Service offers highly available global network resource health checking and real-time alerting that can easily integrate into almost any network management platform. Supporting all the same health checks as FortiDirector, the monitoring-only service allows you to set custom alert thresholds so you know almost immediately if your network or servers are experiencing problems. FortiDirector Monitoring Service lets you choose how you want to be alerted with the choice of unlimited SMS and emails, or integrate alerts to your management platforms with HTTP Post and SNMP methods.

Deployment:

Documentation:

Download the Fortinet FortiDirector Datasheet (.PDF)