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Panorama Administrator's Guide

Context Switch—Firewall or Panorama

Table of Contents

Context Switch—Firewall or Panorama

The Panorama™ web interface enables you to toggle between a Panorama-centric view and a firewall-centric view using the Context drop-down at the top-left of every tab. Set the Context to Panorama to manage firewalls centrally or switch context to the web interface of a specific firewall to configure it locally. The similarity of the Panorama and firewall web interfaces enables you to seamlessly move between them to monitor and manage firewalls.

The Context drop-down lists only the firewalls that are connected to Panorama. For a Device Group and Template administrator, the drop-down lists only the connected firewalls that are within the Access Domains assigned to that administrator. To search a long list, use the Filters within the drop-down.

For firewalls in a high availability (HA) configuration, the icons have colored backgrounds to indicate the HA state (as follows). Knowing the HA state is useful when selecting a firewall context. For example, you generally make firewall-specific configuration changes on an active firewall.

Green—Active.
Yellow—Passive or the firewall is initiating (the initiating state lasts for up to 60 seconds after boot up).
Red—The firewall is non-functional (error state), suspended (an administrator disabled the firewall), or tentative (for a link or path monitoring event in an active/active HA configuration).

When you configure an admin role profile for a Device Group and Template admin, you must assign a Device Admin Role that is pushed to your managed firewalls to context switch between the Panorama and firewall web interface.

During the context switch, Panorama validates if the admin has access to a specific vsys or for all vsys. If the admin has access to all vsys, then Panorama uses the device admin role context switch. If the admin has access to one or some of the vsys, then Panorama uses the vsys admin role to context switch.

Centralized Firewall Configuration and Update Management

Total Configuration Size for Panorama