Centralized Management and Licensing (Noob Question)

[NoThankYou]

Hi everyone! I'm so thankful I found this site and I've been browsing all of the questions and answers for the past few days. I'm hoping everyone can help guide me in the right direction. I'm fairly new to the checkpoint world, but I can tell the firewalls are powerful and fairly easy to use. I have a 1430 appliance that I purchased, and I want to be able to retain logs for a long period of time so I can run web filtering reports and also bandwidth reports. I know they have a centralized management server that I can install either in AWS or locally at my site, but from what I've read, I need a license to do this, and in looking, the license is something crazy like $5000. Does that sound right?

I want to use the full power of my firewall, and run reports and pull logs, but is it really true that I need to spend an additional 5K on a license for a management server? I come from the watchguard world where they give you the management software for free as long as you have a current firewall that's under support.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Bob_Zimmerman]

Hi everyone! I'm so thankful I found this site and I've been browsing all of the questions and answers for the past few days. I'm hoping everyone can help guide me in the right direction. I'm fairly new to the checkpoint world, but I can tell the firewalls are powerful and fairly easy to use. I have a 1430 appliance that I purchased, and I want to be able to retain logs for a long period of time so I can run web filtering reports and also bandwidth reports. I know they have a centralized management server that I can install either in AWS or locally at my site, but from what I've read, I need a license to do this, and in looking, the license is something crazy like $5000. Does that sound right?

I want to use the full power of my firewall, and run reports and pull logs, but is it really true that I need to spend an additional 5K on a license for a management server? I come from the watchguard world where they give you the management software for free as long as you have a current firewall that's under support.

Any help would be appreciated.

Check Point's biggest selling point is their management infrastructure. It makes it possible for a small number of admins to manage hundreds or even thousands of firewalls. I have personally worked on deployments in the 3000 gateway range. They know the management is what the big companies are buying, so they charge for it. I would be surprised if you could get a full SmartCenter license for only $5k.

Reading the release notes for version R77.20.20 on the 600, 700, 1100, and 1400 boxes (sk110875), they added the ability to send security logs to syslog servers. That may work for you if you only need log retention. What version is your system?