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Start from a neutral baseline and add what matters to you. Criteria are labeled by source — the platform baseline is architecture-neutral; buyer-contributed criteria are shown separately.
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Jumping straight to inline blocking risks outages from false positives — look for a described monitor-then-enforce rollout process, not an assumption that blocking mode is safe from day one.
Signature count alone doesn't indicate detection quality; look for independent testing results (e.g., NSS Labs-style or vendor-disclosed) covering both detection rate and false-positive rate together.
Marketed throughput often assumes minimal inspection; look for a real-world figure with full decryption/DPI enabled, since that's the actual production configuration for most deployments.
Full decryption raises privacy/compliance questions (especially for regulated data); look for the vendor addressing this tradeoff directly, including any selective-decryption/bypass-list capability for sensitive traffic classes.
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Verified buyers can suggest criteria (anonymized before pooling).
Look for a stated time-to-signature figure for emergency threats, plus confirmation of automatic (not manual-download) deployment — stale signatures leave known-exploited gaps open.
Look for surgical, centrally-managed suppression — broad rule-disabling to kill one false positive quietly reopens real coverage gaps.
Fail-open vs. fail-closed is a critical, deployment-specific decision (uptime vs. security posture) — look for it being explicitly configurable, not a fixed vendor default the buyer can't change.
Look for real orchestration integration extending response beyond the IDS/IPS's own inline action, not just log forwarding requiring manual SOC correlation.
Look for transparent, explicit disclosure of what's bundled versus a paid add-on; signature/threat-intel updates gated behind a separate subscription is a common way buyers underestimate real total cost.
Look for an explicit answer on feature parity — virtual form factors sometimes lag behind hardware sensors in detection capability, which matters for a customer building a hybrid or cloud-first architecture.
A blocked attack still deserves full forensic investigation to understand intent/scope — ask for a specific answer on captured forensic depth and retention, not just confirmation that the attack was blocked.
A device sitting inline on network traffic is significant security infrastructure — insist on the real validation certificate/level, not just a logo or unqualified 'certified' claim.
Ask for a specific answer on centralized, synchronized management at scale; sensor drift at less-actively-managed remote sites is a common real gap for large distributed organizations.
Trend-over-time reporting suitable for board audiences is a distinct capability from a real-time dashboard built for security engineers — confirm this exists as a maintained, exportable report.
Strong answers describe real migration tooling and a concrete, customer-validated timeline; a vendor with no migration story is asking the customer to manually rebuild potentially years of accumulated signature tuning from scratch.
This is a real, common buyer question given the functional overlap between standalone IDS/IPS and NGFW's own threat-prevention module — a vendor should give an honest answer about the boundary and complementarity, not imply a standalone purchase is always necessary.