Forward SaaS
The Forward Platform is offered as an on-premises or as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution.
The on-premises deployments are managed by the customers while the SaaS offering is fully managed by Forward Networks.
The SaaS offering is a hosted cloud deployment which only requires the download and installation of a Forward Collector in your network infrastructure. It is the bridge between your network devices and the Forward Platform software. The collector will download the configuration and state of these devices, and then sends this data securely to the Forward SaaS to be analyzed and create a Snapshot of your network. Depending on how often you expect your network configs to change, you can adjust how often a Snapshot should be collected.
The overall installation process is easy to follow, and only requires a few minutes.
System Requirements
- Supported platforms: Ubuntu Linux (16.04 LTS or later versions), CentOS/RHEL (7.0 or later version), macOS (10.14 or later versions), Windows 7 (or later versions)
- The user must have admin privileges on the machine
- A supported browser to access the Forward application’s UI
Hardware Requirements
The Forward Collector has the following hardware requirements for production deployments. The recommended values column indicates resources that can sustain faster collections with a device concurrency of 256 or higher.
| Resource | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 16 vCPUs | 32 vCPUs |
| Memory | 32 GB | 64GB+ |
| Disk | 30 GB | 60GB+ |
To perform collections from a lab or small network of up to a 100 devices, a smaller VM with 4 vCPUs and 8GB or 16GB RAM may be sufficient. However, the stability of collection operations cannot be guaranteed with those resources.
- We strongly recommend using a dedicated VM for the collector rather than sharing the VM for multiple applications.
- By default, the collector uses up to 60% of total system memory.
- The disk requirements in the table above are for the directory where the collector will be installed which might be
/opt,/usr/local,/Applicationsetc. depending on the OS or selected by the user. The space is used for installing the collector, persisting device credentials, and to store any collected files before uploading them to Forward SaaS.
The collector resource requirements primarily depend on the collection concurrency , and the volume of data collected from each device (e.g. large internet-size tables require more memory). Allocating too few CPUs might limit the concurrency and collection speed, while allocating too little memory or disk space might prevent successful collections entirely.
Network Requirements
- The machine must be able to access https://fwd.app/ via HTTPS directly or via a web proxy
- SSH must be configured and working on the network devices from which the Forward Collector will collect data
- The OS instance on which the Forward Collector is installed must have IP and SSH port reachability to the network devices, either directly, or via a jump server
- It is important to add a contiguous set of devices to the collection, including all transit routers and switches. Path Analysis and Intent Verification checks will be contained within a given individual contiguous set
Guided Network Setup
Please proceed to the Guided Network Setup page for instructions on how to setup a Network using a step-by-step wizard-based process that walks you you trough the entire process.