Finding Your Way Around
Connect is a single application with a navigation menu down the left side. Every screen is one or two clicks from it.
The navigation menu
The menu collapses to icons with the arrow at its foot and stays collapsed until you expand it again. On a narrow window it collapses on its own.
| Menu item | What you find there |
|---|---|
| Inventory | The resources Connect has discovered that carry IP addresses: a Dashboard tab with charts by type, by integration, and changes over time, and a Resources tab with a searchable table. See Inventory. |
| Groups | Your Groups, on tabs for all Groups, Groups no Boundary references, Groups with pending changes, and Groups a firewall has fetched as a dynamic list. See Groups. |
| Feeds | Shown greyed out. Not available yet. |
| Change | Change requests: submit one, watch it evaluate, and read the result. See Change Requests. |
| Boundaries | The guardrails change requests are evaluated against, as a table, as a grid of sources and destinations, or as a grid of Groups. See Boundaries. |
| Decommission | Assets that look like they've been retired, the actions that find them, and the history of what was exported. See Decommission. |
| Alerts | Your personal Slack and Microsoft Teams alert settings. See Alerts. |
| Integrations | One row per integration Connect supports, with a New Integration Account button and a search box. Expand a row to see its accounts and edit, delete, or provision one. Each account row shows whether it runs On-Prem or from the Cloud, its latest Connector job, and a Discovery Errors tag when discovery hit a problem. See Where to find what was discovered. |
| Settings | The administrative pages, listed below. |
| Your initials | Your name, email address, and organization, plus About and Sign Out. |
| Notices | Things that need your attention, including discovery errors and failing Connector jobs. A badge, colored by severity, counts the unread ones, and an All/Unread toggle shows dismissed notices. Most notices can be dismissed one at a time; the discovery error and Connector job notices stay until the problem clears. Hidden for a change-only user. |
| Theme | Light, Dark, or Auto, which follows your operating system. |
Someone whose only role is Firewall Change Requestors sees only Change, the account menu, and Theme.
The home page
The home page is a starting point. It has:
- Shortcuts to the tasks most people set up first: a Group and a Boundary for external access, Decommission, Boundaries, and getting a Group onto your firewalls through a dynamic list or the Connector.
- A Getting Started checklist: add an integration, choose attribute shortcuts, create a Group, use the Group. The current step moves on once you have an account, and again once you have a Group.
- Counts of your Boundaries, change requests, Groups, inventory items, and integrations, each linking to its page.
Click FireMon Connect at the top of the menu to come back here.
Settings
| Page | What it's for |
|---|---|
| About | The application version and whether an update is available, your organization's name and client ID, and your own user details. The client ID is part of every Group's dynamic list URL. |
| API Keys | Long-lived keys for scripts and firewalls. See API keys. |
| Boundaries | What happens to a change request when no Pass or Fail Boundary matches it, and the internal address space that defines The Internet network object. See The default result. |
| Connectors | Download the on-prem Connector (optional), pair one with a registration code, see which are online, and watch their jobs. See Connector. |
| Group Credentials | The username and password firewalls use to fetch Group dynamic lists. See Dynamic lists. |
| Projects | The project tree that accounts, Groups, Boundaries, and role assignments hang off. See Projects. |
| Users | Invite users and assign roles per project. See Users and Roles. |
Common controls
Search and filters. Inventory, Decommission, and the Connector jobs list share one filter control. Open it and pick a filter (Account, Project, Region, Resource Type, and so on) and one or more values, or type a search term. The filters are written into the page's URL, so a filtered view can be bookmarked or sent to a colleague. A typed term is matched as an exact phrase, which is what you want for names with hyphens such as i-012345. To use Lucene syntax instead, such as the * and ? wildcards (10.1.* finds addresses that start with 10.1.) or a field search like ip:"10.0.0.0/8", choose the drop-down's second option, Search for items containing …, which leaves the term unquoted. The Decommission Candidates tab is the exception: its search matches plain text in the rows already loaded, so Lucene syntax doesn't apply there.
Refresh. The change request list refreshes itself while a request is evaluating, the Connector jobs list while a job is in progress, and the Connectors list to keep connection status current. Every other list has a refresh button beside its action buttons.
Changes. The Groups, Boundaries, change request, and Decommission action tables have a Changes column showing when the row was created and last updated, and by whom.
Save. Forms save from the button that appears at the foot of the page once you've changed something, usually labeled Save. New Integration Account, Settings > Boundaries, and the Provision page of every integration other than AWS and Azure show it from the moment the page opens instead, greyed out until there's something to save, with the reason (no changes, unsaved changes, or fields in error) spelled out beside it. Settings > Group Credentials has its own Save button instead. If you navigate away with unsaved edits, Connect asks whether you want to review them first.
Project. Groups, Boundaries, change requests, and Decommission actions each belong to a project, chosen when they're created, and that's what a table's Project column shows. Projects explains why it matters.