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

Understanding global counters

When you are troubleshooting a connectivity issue, the log files and packet captures provide a wealth of information, but sometimes, they're not enough to figure out what is happening to a session. All sessions, whether they are traversing the firewall or getting dropped, are tracked by all the processes that touch them, and counters are incremented for each step that a packet takes and for each packet in a session. This can provide a wealth of information if something is not working as expected.

The global counters can be viewed by running the following command:

reaper@PA-VM> show counter global

This will output all of the global counters, which is not very useful. You can add a delta filter to only show global counters for the period between the last and the penultimate time that the command was issued. The duration will be indicated in the output:

reaper@PA-VM> show counter global filter delta yes

The output will look similar...