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Panorama Administrator's Guide

Preview, Validate, or Commit Configuration Changes

Table of Contents

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.

(Device Groups only) When you make a configuration change to a parent device group, pushing these changes to managed firewalls associated with its child device groups is supported only from the Panorama web interface. In this instance, device group configuration changes pushed from the Panorama CLI are pushed only to managed firewalls directly associated with the impacted device group and not to any managed firewalls associated with its child device groups. Child device groups are selected by default when you push a device group configuration change for a parent device group from the Panorama web interface and are not included by default when you push from the Panorama CLI.

For example, you create ParentDG1 with two firewall associated and its ChildDG2 with two different managed firewalls associated. You make configuration changes to ParentDG1.

In this scenario, Push to Devices and Commit and Push from the Panorama web interface successfully push the ParentDG1 changes to all four firewalls. However, the commit-all operation from the Panorama CLI pushes only to managed firewalls associated with ParentDG1.

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.
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.

After you upgrade Panorama to PAN-OS 10.1, Preview Changes shows that HIP Profiles called source-hip-any and destination-hip-any were added to each Security policy rule for any managed firewall running PAN-OS 9.1 or earlier release instead of hip-profiles-any. This is due to a change to the XML file Panorama uses to compare the running and candidate configurations in PAN-OS 10.0 and later releases. You can ignore this error as the push will succeed.

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.
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.
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.
(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. No Default Selections to manually select specific devices. The default devices Panorama pushes to are based on the impacted device group and template configuration changes.
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.
  Merge with Device Candidate Config—This setting is enabled by default and merges any pending local firewall configurations with the configuration push from Panorama. The local firewall configuration is merged and committed regardless of the admin pushing the changes from Panorama or the admin who made the local firewall configuration changes.
  Disable this setting if you manage and commit local firewall configuration changes independently of the Panorama managed configuration.
3. Click OK to save your changes to the Push Scope.
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.
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.
Verify the configuration push from Panorama was successful.
1. Log in to the firewall CLI.
2. Run one of the following commands.
  admin> show config pushed-template
  
  admin> show config merged
  
  The show commands for specific configuration objects are designed to show only the local firewall configuration and not the Panorama-pushed configuration.
  
  For example, the show network virtual router command ran on the firewall CLI shows only the virtual router configuration local to the firewall and does not show the Panorama-pushed virtual router configuration.

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