FortiGate 50e Traffic shaping

[cargotank]

Greetings,

I work in a small company with around 15 colleagues. We currently have a FortiGate 50e firewall, but there is no traffic shaping configured. it currently leads to problems if someone is downloading large files and interrupts high-priority traffic. I have read-only access to the firewall, as the network is operated by an external IT company.
I would like to ask for some advice on how to set up traffic shaping on the FortiGate 50e.

I am thinking of dividing the bandwidth equally between users, and then limiting the download and upload speeds from certain websites such as WeTransfer, Mega, and Dropbox. However, I am open to other suggestions. Are there best practice examples on how to set up traffic shaping?

Is there a calculator that I can use to find out how much bandwidth I need? Also, do you have any common mistakes that the external IT company might have made when setting up our FortiGate?

I am tired of being dismissed by IT support when I report problems with my network, cause they know that I do not have a deep understanding of their work. I am determined to learn more about networks so that I can better understand my problems and confront IT support when they are wrong. What would you think be the first step to achieve this goal?

Cheers

[kgeorge]

Hello,

In order to limit/control the bandwidth or allocate a specific bandwidth for any kind of traffic on FortiGate, it is Traffic Shaping that is required and there is no other way out on this.

In order to configure Traffic Shaping, we need to have Read/Write access to FortiGate, and I am sure that you are aware of this.

In order to know more about Traffic Shaping, you can refer this documentation,

https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/7.4.0/administration-guide/297431/traffic-shaping

And, regarding the Best Practices/Set up related of FortiGate, you can check this,

https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/6.4.0/hardening-your-fortigate/436606/security-best-pra...

Regards,

Klint George

[cargotank]

thank you for the best practices link!

[ebilcari]

In my opinion the better approach is to limit the speed for abusing apps/sites like file shares and video streaming for everyone (a quarter or half of the full Bandwidth ex. 50Mbps). Setting up a fixed speed for every user will cause discomfort on their daily tasks. Most of the user traffic is in spikes that require high bandwidth for a short period of time even for legitimate web access.

[cargotank]

Thank you!