Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

To safeguard against security threats, it is crucial to ensure that your organization is effectively secured across networks, mobile devices, and the cloud. Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services. With this book, you'll understand Palo Alto Networks and learn how to implement essential techniques, right from deploying firewalls through to advanced troubleshooting. The book starts by showing you how to set up and configure the Palo Alto Networks firewall, helping you to understand the technology and appreciate the simple, yet powerful, PAN-OS platform. Once you've explored the web interface and command-line structure, you'll be able to predict expected behavior and troubleshoot anomalies with confidence. You'll learn why and how to create strong security policies and discover how the firewall protects against encrypted threats. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with identifying users and controlling access to your network with user IDs and even prioritize traffic using quality of service (QoS). The book will show you how to enable special modes on the firewall for shared environments and extend security capabilities to smaller locations. By the end of this network security book, you'll be well-versed with advanced troubleshooting techniques and best practices recommended by an experienced security engineer and Palo Alto Networks expert.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: First Steps and Basic Configuration
4
Section 2: Advanced Configuration and Putting the Features to Work
10
Section 3: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Reporting

Reports can be generated on the firewall to provide an overview at a glance about which applications are most popular or how many threats were detected for a certain timeframe.

The firewall has a set of predefined reports that run overnight and provide the most common insights.

Pre-defined reports

These reports provide a wide variety of information about the types of applications, threats, traffic, and URL filtering activity. They are set to run at 2 A.M., but if this is not a convenient time, you can change the start time in Device | Setup | Management | Logging and Reporting Settings | Log Export and reporting and change Report Runtime. As you can see in the following screenshot, you can also disable some reports in the Pre-Defined Reports tab by unchecking them and committing the change:

Figure 9.15 – Enabling or disabling pre-defined reports

You can find the reports in Monitor | Reports. On the right-hand side, you can select which...