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

Analyzing session flows

We've all been there; you've reviewed the logs, collected packet captures, and looked at the global counters, but you still can't find out what exactly is happening with a session. The last resort is to look at a session one packet at a time as it goes through the firewall and see what is happening to each packet at every stage and process:

Important note

Inspecting the flow is a very labor-intensive task for the data plane processor to do, so it is paramount that a very strict filter is set, which will also help prevent clutter, as well as ensure that the data plane is not already low on resources. To keep an eye on the data plane, use the following command while collecting the information to make sure you're not creating more issues by overloading the data plane.

reaper@PA-VM> show running resource-monitor second

Be vigilant in ensuring that the data plane cores do not hit 100% consistently and that the packet descriptors...