What Is GMS?

The Global Management System (GMS) is a Web-based application that can configure and manage thousands of SonicWALL firewall appliances and NetMonitor non-SonicWALL appliances from a central location.

GMS can be used as a Management Console in an Enterprise network containing a single SonicWALL E-Class NSA or SuperMassive. SonicWALL GMS can also be used as a Remote Management System for managing multiple unit deployments for Enterprise and Service Provider networks consisting of hundreds and thousands of firewalls, Email Security appliances, CDP appliances and Secure Remote Access appliances. This dramatically lowers the cost of managing a secure distributed network. GMS does this by enabling administrators to monitor the status of and apply configurations to all managed SonicWALL appliances, groups of SonicWALL appliances, or individual SonicWALL appliances. SonicWALL GMS also provides centralized management of scheduling and pushing firmware updates to multiple appliances and to apply configuration backups of appliances at regular intervals.

GMS provides monitoring features that enable you to view the current status of SonicWALL appliances and non-SonicWALL appliances, pending tasks, and log messages. It also provides graphical reporting of Firewall, SRA, CDP, and ES appliance and network activities for the SonicWALL appliances. A wide range of informative real-time and historical reports can be generated to provide insight into usage trends and security events.

Network administrators can also configure multiple site VPNs for SonicWALL appliances. From the GMS user interface (UI), you can add VPN licenses to SonicWALL appliances, configure VPN settings, and enable or disable remote-client access for each network.