Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

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. This book is an end-to-end guide to configure firewalls and deploy them in your network infrastructure. You will see how to quickly set up, configure and understand the technology, and troubleshoot any issues that may occur. This book will serve as your go-to reference for everything from setting up to troubleshooting complex issues. You will learn your way around the web interface and command-line structure, understand how the technology works so you can confidently predict the expected behavior, and successfully troubleshoot any anomalies you may encounter. Finally, you will see how to deploy firewalls in a cloud environment, and special or unique considerations when setting them to protect resources. By the end of this book, for your configuration setup you will instinctively know how to approach challenges, find the resources you need, and solve most issues efficiently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Understanding global counters

When you are troubleshooting a connectivity issue, the log files and packet captures provide a wealth of information, but sometimes, they’re not enough to figure out what is happening to a session. All sessions, whether they are traversing the firewall or getting dropped, are tracked by all the processes that touch them. This tracking is done by counters that increment with each step a packet takes, or action a process performs, for each packet in a session. This can provide a wealth of information if something is not working as expected.

The global counters can be viewed by running the following command:

reaper@PA-VM> show counter global

This will output all of the global counters without context, which is not very useful. You can add a delta filter to only show global counters for the period between the previous and the last time that the command was issued. The duration will be indicated in the output:

reaper@PA-VM> show...