Troubleshoot App-ID Cloud Engine

• To check if an appliance has a valid SaaS Security Inline license, run the operational CLI command show cloud-appid connection-to-cloud. If there is an issue, the command returns the message:
  ACE Error: License check failed. Check if SaaS license is installed and activeCloud connection: failed
  In addition, the output shows the time of the last successful connection, for example: Last successful gRPC connection: 2021-05-20 16:00:00 -0800 PDT
  If the license is installed and the connection to ACE is good, then the command returns the URL for the ACE cloud server connection and the status Cloud connection: connected, along with connection statistics and the status of the device certificate, including the certificate validity dates.
• Panorama commit all/push to managed firewalls fails. Check if any of the following conditions exist and repair them:
  • Do managed firewalls have a valid SaaS Security Inline license? If not, then they do not have the ACE catalog and the commit all/push operation fails. Depending on whether you want to managed firewalls to handle ACE App-IDs, either remove the ACE objects from the pushed configuration and try again or install valid SaaS Security Inline licenses on the managed firewalls, wait for the catalog to download.
    There are fewer than four thousand content-provided App-IDs. After you download the ACE catalog, you see many thousands more applications on the firewall and can confirm by checking ObjectsApplications or by using the operational CLI command show cloud-appid cloud-app-data application all to see the new App-IDs.
  • Has the connection between a managed firewall and ACE has gone down? Check the connection to the ACE cloud and restore the connection if necessary.
    The operational CLI command show cloud-appid connection-to-cloud provides the cloud connection status and the ACE cloud server URL.
  • The ACE catalog on Panorama and the ACE catalog on managed firewalls is out-of-sync, which results in pushed configurations that include ACE apps that are not in the firewall’s catalog. If the connection between the firewall and ACE is up, the outdated catalog will update in the next few minutes automatically and resolve the issue. (Wait five minutes and try again.)
    You can also run the operational CLI command debug cloud-appid cloud-manual-pull check-cloud-app-data to update the catalog manually.
  • Are the firewalls all running PAN-OS 11.0 or later? (Pushing configurations that reference ACE applications and objects to firewalls running earlier versions than PAN-OS 11.0 is not allowed.)
• In an HA pair (active/active or active/passive) that has an ACE configuration, if you run the operational command show session all or show session id <id>, the output for ACE applications may show the global App-ID number instead of the application name. The firewall only shows the application name if its data plane has the cloud application data. If not, then the firewall shows the global App-ID number for the application instead.
• To reset the connection to ACE (the gRPC connection), run the operational CLI command debug cloud-appid reset connection-to-cloud.
• View the ACE applications downloaded to the appliance with the operational CLI command show cloud-appid cloud-app-data application. You can view all downloaded apps or individual apps by App-ID or application name.
• View pending requests for ACE App-IDs with the operational CLI command show cloud-appid signature-dp pending-request. The output includes how many times the firewall sent the request to ACE (tries). After eleven tries, the send operation times out.
• The operational CLI command show cloud-appid has more useful options:

  admin@PAN-ACE-VM-1> show cloud-appid ? 
  > app-objects-in-policy        Show application-filter/application-groups referred in policy
  > app-to-filtergroup-mapping   Show application to matched filter and groups
  > application                  Show Application info for UI
  > application-filter           Show cloud apps in application-filters
  > application-group            Show cloud apps in application-groups
  > cloud-app-data               Show cloud application, container and metadata
  > connection-to-cloud          Show gRPC connection status to cloud application server
  > ha-info                      Show statistics of cloud application high availability
  > overlap-appid                Show duplicated applications in predefined content
  > signature-dp                 Show cloud signatures and applications used on DP
  > task                         Show task on management-plane
  > transaction                  Show cloud application transaction
  > version                      Show Cloud-AppID version

• To view the global counters for ACE, run the operational CLI command show counter global filter value all category cad (cad stands for “cloud app-identification).
• To view statistics for bytes and packets received and sent to/from shared memory and to/from the security client for services such as ACE, DLP, and IoT, run the operational command show ctd-agent statistics.
• If you notice a discrepancy between the number of applications that match an Application Filter when you look in the user interface versus when you look in the CLI, it’s because of the way the firewall counts matching applications in the user interfaces versus in the CLI:
  • When you look at an Application Filter in ObjectsApplication Filters, the firewall displays all of the matching applications in the ACE catalog, regardless of whether the firewall has actually seen those applications and downloaded their App-IDs, and the number count includes all of those applications.
  • When you look at an Application Filter in the CLI with the show cloud-appid application-filter operational command, the firewall only displays the number of matching applications for which the firewall has downloaded ACE App-IDs.
  For this reason, the user interface may show more matching applications than the CLI for the same Application Filter.
  The same thing applies to Application Groups when you look at them in the user interface versus the CLI.
• ACE App-IDs are supported for Security policy only. ACE App-IDs are not supported for any other policy type.
  However, when you configure QoS or SD-WAN policy, ACE App-IDs are visible (able to be selected) and may be present in Application Groups or Application Filters applied to the rule, but adding them to QoS or SD-WAN policy has no effect on the application traffic. (The QoS and SD-WAN policies don’t control the application traffic.)