: Preview, Validate, or Commit Configuration Changes
Focus
Focus

Preview, Validate, or Commit Configuration Changes

Table of Contents
End-of-Life (EoL)

Preview, Validate, or Commit Configuration Changes

You can perform Panorama Commit, Validation, and Preview Operations on pending changes to the Panorama configuration and then push those changes to the devices that Panorama manages, including firewalls, Log Collectors, and WildFire appliances and appliance clusters. You can filter the pending changes by administrator or location and then commit, push, validate, or preview only those changes. The locations can be specific device groups, templates, Collector Groups, Log Collectors, shared settings, or the Panorama management server.
Because Panorama pushes its running configuration, you cannot push changes to devices until you first commit them to Panorama. If the changes are not ready to activate on devices, you can select CommitCommit to Panorama to commit the changes to the Panorama configuration without pushing them to devices. Later, when the changes are ready to activate on devices, you can select CommitPush to Devices. If the changes are ready to activate on both Panorama and the devices, select CommitCommit and Push as described in the following procedure.
  1. Configure the scope of configuration changes that you will commit, validate, or preview.
    1. Click Commit at the top of the web interface.
    2. Select one of the following options:
      • Commit All Changes (default)—Applies the commit to all changes for which you have administrative privileges. You cannot manually filter the commit scope when you select this option. Instead, the administrator role assigned to the account you used to log in determines the commit scope.
      • Commit Changes Made By—Enables you to filter the commit scope by administrator or location. The administrative role assigned to the account you used to log in determines which changes you can filter.
      To commit the changes of other administrators, the account you used to log in must be assigned the Superuser role or an Admin Role profile with the Commit For Other Admins privilege enabled.
    3. (Optional) To filter the commit scope by administrator, select Commit Changes Made By, click the adjacent link, select the administrators, and click OK.
    4. (Optional) To filter by location, select Commit Changes Made By and clear any changes that you want to exclude from the Commit Scope.
      If dependencies between the configuration changes you included and excluded cause a validation error, perform the commit with all the changes included. For example, when you commit changes to a device group, you must include the changes of all administrators who added, deleted, or repositioned rules for the same rulebase in that device group.
  2. Preview the changes that the commit will activate.
    When you preview changes after you delete and then re-add the same device to a policy rule, Panorama displays that same device as both deleted in the running configuration and as added in the candidate configuration. Additionally, the order of devices in the device target list in the running configuration may then be different from the candidate configuration and display as a change when you preview changes even when there aren't any configuration changes.
    This can be useful if, for example, you don’t remember all your changes and you’re not sure you want to activate all of them.
    Panorama compares the configurations you selected in the Commit Scope to the running configuration. The preview window displays the configurations side-by-side and uses color coding to indicate which changes are additions (green), modifications (yellow), or deletions (red).
    Preview Changes and select the Lines of Context, which is the number of lines from the compared configuration files to display before and after the highlighted differences. These lines help you correlate the preview output to settings in the web interface. Close the preview window when you finish reviewing the changes.
    Because the preview results display in a new window, your browser must allow pop-up windows. If the preview window does not open, refer to your browser documentation for the steps to unblock pop-up windows.
  3. Preview the individual settings for which you are committing changes.
    This can be useful if you want to know details about the changes, such as the types of settings and who changed them.
    1. Click Change Summary.
    2. (Optional) Group By a column name (such as the Type of setting).
    3. Close the Change Summary dialog when you finish reviewing the changes.
  4. Validate the changes before committing to ensure the commit will succeed.
    1. Validate Changes.
      The results display all the errors and warnings that an actual commit would display.
    2. Resolve any errors that the validation results identify.
  5. (Optional) Modify the Push Scope.
    By default, the Push Scope includes all locations with changes that require a Panorama commit.
    If you select CommitPush to Devices, the push scope includes all locations associated with devices that are out of sync with the Panorama running configuration.
    1. Remove Selections to remove firewalls listed in the Push Scope.
    2. Edit Selections and select:
      • Device Groups—Select device groups or individual firewalls or virtual systems.
      • Templates—Select templates, template stacks, or individual firewalls.
      • Collector Groups—Select Collector Groups.
    3. Click OK to save your changes to the Push Scope.
  6. Validate the changes you will push to device groups or templates.
    1. Validate Device Group Push or Validate Template Push.
      The results display all the errors and warnings that an actual push operation would display.
    2. Resolve any errors that the validation results identify.
  7. Commit your changes to Panorama and push the changes to devices.
    Commit and Push the configuration changes.
    Use the Panorama Task Manager to see details about commits that are pending (optionally, you can cancel these), in progress, completed, or failed.