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

Controlling the bandwidth with quality of service policies

Quality of Service (QoS) is the collective name for several technologies that can help improve the quality of applications and the data flows that they are applied to by prioritizing them over other flows or reserving bandwidth to ensure adequate throughput and acceptable latency. In this section, you will learn how QoS marking can be applied to a firewall to interact with network devices downstream.

There are two ways for a firewall to participate in applying QoS to network traffic:

  • Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) and Type of Service (ToS) headers
  • QoS enforcement through built-in capabilities

Let's review external headers first.

DSCP and ToS headers

DSCP headers allow the firewall to let upstream and downstream devices know that certain sessions have a certain priority. These headers can be set in the security policies under the Actions tab, as in the following screenshot:

...