Before upgrading firmware on a switching-station FortiGate, an engineer wants to know whether any features currently in use will behave differently or be deprecated in the target version. Where should the engineer look?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Release notes are the vendor's own heads-up about what changed, what's new, and what got dropped in a given firmware version, so skipping them before an upgrade is a bit like skipping the instructions and hoping nothing important moved. They're the one place built specifically to answer this question.
Full Explanation
Firmware release notes document new features, changed default behaviors, deprecated functionality, and known issues for a specific version, making them the authoritative source for understanding what will be different after an upgrade, exactly the question the engineer is asking before committing a remote device to a new version. SNMP polling graphs show historical performance metrics like CPU and memory trends; they say nothing about feature behavior changes tied to a firmware release. The antivirus signature changelog tracks FortiGuard content updates, a separate release cycle entirely from the firmware image itself, and won't mention configuration or feature-level changes. A cabling diagram documents physical connectivity and has no bearing on software behavior at all. The caveat worth calling out: release notes for the target version aren't always enough on their own if the upgrade passes through intermediate versions along a multi-step path, so the practical check is reviewing release notes for every version in that path, not just the final destination.