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

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.

Inspecting the flow is a very labor-intensive task for the data plane processor to do because it now needs to write a log for each stage or process a packet goes through, for each and every packet in a flow, for all sessions that match the filter. It is paramount that a very strict filter is set, which will help prevent clutter, as well as ensure that the data plane is not unnecessarily deprived of resources.

Use the following command while collecting the information to keep an eye on the data plane, and make sure you’re not creating more issues by overloading it:

reaper@PA-VM>...