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 troubleshooting tool

The web interface is a very convenient way to configure the firewall, but it also holds several tools that you can use to troubleshoot issues you might encounter. The troubleshooting tool, which you can find in Device | Troubleshooting, lets you run several tests past your configuration to see what the system is expected to do in the given situation.

Some of the available tests let you verify whether the system can connect to cloud services, as illustrated in the following screenshot.

Click on Test Result to see the Result Detail pane on the right-hand side:

Figure 11.6 – A cloud connectivity test

The troubleshooting tool lets you test several policies to see whether they will behave as you expect. The following policies can be tested:

  • Security policy match
  • QoS policy match
  • Authentication policy match
  • Decryption/SSL policy match
  • NAT policy match
  • Policy-based forwarding policy match
  • ...