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

Using the tools at our disposal

Knowing your way around the web interface is a great start if you need to troubleshoot an issue. There are plenty of spaces where valuable information is stored, and knowing just where to look can be the difference between quickly checking and fixing an issue versus spending hours trying to figure out why something isn't working.

As we saw in Chapter 9, Logging and Reporting, the Monitor tab is such a place where knowing where to look can make a difference. Logs are maintained for just about any event, from sessions passing through or being blocked by the firewall or a security profile to things happening on the firewall itself. In most cases, the log files will be the first place to look if something unexpected happened.

Log files

There are many different log databases that collect specific information. Knowing where to look is essential if you want to quickly find information relating to the issue you are investigating:

  • Traffic...