You can use an SNMP manager to monitor event-driven alerts and operational statistics for the firewall, Panorama, or WF-500 appliance and for the traffic they process. The statistics and traps can help you identify resource limitations, system changes or failures, and malware attacks. You configure alerts by forwarding log data as traps, and enable the delivery of statistics in response to GET messages (requests) from your SNMP manager. Each trap and statistic has an object identifier (OID). Related OIDs are organized hierarchically within the Management Information Bases (MIBs) that you load into the SNMP manager to enable monitoring.

The firewall, Panorama, and WF-500 appliance support SNMP Version 2c and Version 3. Decide which to use based on the version that other devices in your network support and on your network security requirements. SNMPv3 is more secure and enables more granular access control for system statistics than SNMPv2c. The following table summarizes the security features of each version. You select the version and configure the security features when you Monitor Statistics Using SNMP and Forward Traps to an SNMP Manager.

Figure 1 illustrates a deployment in which firewalls forward traps to an SNMP manager while also forwarding logs to Log Collectors. Alternatively, you could configure the Log Collectors to forward the firewall traps to the SNMP manager. For details on these deployments, refer to Log Forwarding Options in Centralized Logging and Reporting. In all deployments, the SNMP manager gets statistics directly from the firewall, Panorama, or WF-500 appliance. In this example, a single SNMP manager collects both traps and statistics, though you can use separate managers for these functions if that better suits your network.

The following topics describe how Palo Alto Networks firewalls, Panorama, and WF-500 appliances implement SNMP, and the procedures to configure SNMP monitoring and trap delivery.