.. Chapter one according to https://arc42.org/overview

.. _1IntroductionGoals:

1. Introduction and Goals
=========================

**fotoobo** is the mighty **Fo**\ rtinet **too**\l\ **bo**\ x for managing your Fortinet environment.
The tool consists of several useful utilities with functionality which is not covered by the
standard Fortinet management suite. It is meant to be extendable to your needs.

One of its main use cases for the initial developers has been to give several different scripts a
common home. With this they could apply the DRY principle to them by using a common platform for
getting and pushing data to several Fortinet products.

Goals
-----
- **fotoobo** should simplify managing your Fortinet device zoo by providing some simple to use
  commands for doing daily tasks or gather information for further use, e.g. monitoring.
- It should be easily extendable for further needs.
- It should be easily usable in cron-jobs or custom scripts.
- Fill in gaps in the Fortinet management tools but do not recreate existing ways of getting data
  from your Fortinet products. This means a bit more precisely put:

  - Summarize or enhance information that can be got using the REST API
  - Create simple, well integrable tools for common tasks: backing up configs, enhance data for
    simpler use in monitoring systems, ...


Supported Fortinet products
---------------------------

At the moment **fotoobo** supports the following Fortinet products:

- FortiGate (tested with FortiOS 6.4, 7.0 and 7.2)
- FortiManager
- FortiClient EMS
- FortiAnalyzer
- FortiCloud Portal (support.fortinet.com)


Core use cases
--------------

Some of **fotoobo**'s main use cases are:

- Backup configurations from FortiGate devices (and push them to an SFTP server)
- Fill in gaps in the monitoring of different Fortinet products (e.g. SSL-VPN pool usage when more
  than one IP subnet is available for client IPs).
- Give an overview over your infrastructure in a nice way:

  - Version of your Fortinet devices,
  - Version distribution of the FortiClients managed by your FortiClient EMS
  - Some summary information of your (backed up) FortiGate configurations
- Check (the backed up) FortiGate configurations against a set of policy checks
- Besides "usual" logging capabilities write an audit log to a syslog server


fotoobo vs. Fortinet REST API
-----------------------------

There is a general purpose API for all of the supported devices. **fotoobo** uses them all to "talk"
to the respective device, so basically it's no "vs.". For you this means you are always free to
implement your use cases in own scripts directly utilizing the REST API. What **fotoobo** can offer
you is to remove the boiler plate code needed to get and push data to the respective APIs. See the
:ref:`ModuleDocumentation` for further information on whether **fotoobo** is usable to you. If not,
please help us to make it so :-).


fotoobo vs. Fortinet ansible module
-----------------------------------

The main goal of **fotoobo** is not (yet) to provide tools to manipulate the configuration of the
respective devices. For this please use the
`Fortinet ansible module <https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/fortinet/index.html>`_
or the REST API's directly.

What **fotoobo** can do for you in this cases is for example information gathering and enhancing, e.g.
through the `convert` commands.