Zenarmor 1.15 has just been released, offering some important new and improved capabilities with a focus on providing a better-performing dashboard experience overall while introducing useful features that enterprises and MSSPs can leverage to more efficiently manage administrative users and their roles across multi-tenant and large enterprise Zenarmor NGFW deployments.
A brief list of the updates included in this release are as follows:
- Full-featured role-based multi-tenancy support, including account and project sharing.
- An improved and more performant dashboard frontend built using the Vue.js 3 JavaScript framework.
- The addition of new web and application filtering categories.
- General bug fixes and minor UI improvements.
When you are ready, let’s unpack and talk about these new capabilities in a bit more detail.
Why is Zenarmor’s full-featured role-based multi-tenancy support advantageous in enterprise environments?
Multi-tenant architecture is prevalent across enterprise environments and is seen frequently in SaaS and other cloud-based applications. The implementation of a full-featured role-based multi-tenancy architecture into Zenarmor makes sense because it’s likely that in a large enterprise deployment, you will have multiple Zenarmor instances across multiple locations deployed, or in the case of an MSSP you may have multiple clients running Zenarmor instances that you are managing on their behalf, which all require varying levels of administrative user access.
As of this release, managing multiple administrative users and their roles is a simple task. Zenconsole now supports role-based sharing for projects, enabling users to control and customize project access and collaboration based on specific roles and permissions. A project in terms of Zenconsole, is basically a container or folder in the platform that allows you to group Zenarmor firewall instances. If you are an enterprise, you could create a project for each branch site or office, whereas an MSSP could create a project for each of their clients, the choice is yours.
Users can now be assigned the roles of owner, admin, operator, and viewer with an account session and full audit log feature, empowering administrators to view and manage active sessions with ease while monitoring all session information about the user, including platform, browser, IP address, location, login, last seen, and remotely terminating sessions.
In addition to this, should a user make changes to a Zenarmor instance or policy setting, the changes are reflected in real-time across all active user sessions, which mitigates any potential configuration inconsistencies if multiple administrators or operators are present.
Why making use of the Vue.js 3 frontend framework in the Zenconsole dashboard UI is beneficial
Vue.js is a popular JavaScript development framework used for frontend web development that is not only lightweight but also offers incredible speed and performance, which is made possible by the framework’s ability to make use of virtual document object models (DOM) and two-way bindings, which eliminates the need to keep re-rendering the entire DOM, perhaps better understood as the components or objects that make up the web application that you interact with, like text, buttons, tables, etc., every time there is an update. This makes Vue.js ideal for applications that need to display real-time data and updates, like in the case of the Zenconsole dashboard.
To avoid diving too deep into the world of frontend web development, these combined Vue.js capabilities basically allow the Zenconsole frontend development team to give you the best possible dashboard experience by making sure that all real-time data like live connection sessions, informational graphs, etc. are updated and displayed as quickly as possible while maintaining a snappy user experience navigating between dashboard menus and settings overall.
Some new web and application categories included in this release.
Several new web and application filtering categories have been introduced that are fairly self-explanatory including:
- THC/Cannabis Products
- Generative AI
In addition to this, you can now seamlessly import and export custom web category lists, making it easier to maintain and share custom web category configurations. Further enhancement ensures that custom web category content is accurately displayed in the exclusion list, allowing for better overall control and customization.
Other noteworthy additions in this release
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Zenconsole reporting capabilities are enhanced by adding new chart types that are already available on OPNsense web UI, like Top Destination Locations Heatmap, Table of Local Assets, Table of Remote Hosts, TLS/DNS/Web-Top Egress/Ingress Users, providing improved visualization options for a richer monitoring experience.
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Zenarmor’s Web UI menu has been seamlessly integrated into the OPNsense user privilege system.
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Improved subscription management and other minor UI improvements.
Are you ready to try Zenarmor 1.15 for yourself?
If you answered yes to this question, and you are an existing Zenarmor customer, head over to either Zenconsole or your OPNSense dashboard and apply the 1.15 update.
Alternatively, If you are new to Zenarmor and would like to explore the great capabilities that Zenarmor has to offer, you can simply sign-up and start your Zenarmor® Business Edition 15-day trial, with no credit cards required.
Alternatively, feel free to contact Zenarmor at