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

Chapter 13: Supporting Tools

In this chapter, we will be taking a look at a few tools that can make managing your firewalls and keeping an eye on the overall health of your organization straightforward. Many organizations have monitoring tools, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), in place that already collect and aggregate information from many systems just to keep track of important incidents or to keep on top of change management. We will learn about a couple of handy add-ons that elevate an admin's visibility into the system health or network security. We will also look at an interesting and convenient (and free!) tool that aggregates and helps to enforce external threat intelligence feeds. Lastly, we will have a look at the Application Programming Interface (API).

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Integrating Palo Alto Networks with Splunk
  • Monitoring with Pan(w)achrome
  • Threat intelligence with MineMeld...