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    Use Panorama for Visibility

    Table of Contents

    Use Panorama for Visibility

    In addition to its central deployment and firewall configuration features, Panorama also allows you to monitor and report on all traffic that traverses your network. While the reporting capabilities on Panorama and the firewall are very similar, the advantage that Panorama provides is that it is a single pane view of aggregated information across all your managed firewalls. This aggregated view provides actionable information on trends in user activity, traffic patterns, and potential threats across your entire network.
    Using the Application Command Center (ACC), the App-Scope, the log viewer, and the standard, customizable reporting options on Panorama, you can quickly learn more about the traffic traversing the network. The ability to view this information allows you to evaluate where your current policies are adequate and where they are insufficient. You can then use this data to augment your network security strategy. For example, you can enhance the security rules to increase compliance and accountability for all users across the network, or manage network capacity and minimize risks to assets while meeting the rich application needs for the users in your network.
    The following topics provide a high-level view of the reporting capabilities on Panorama, including a couple of use cases to illustrate how you can use these capabilities within your own network infrastructure. For a complete list of the available reports and charts and the description of each, refer to the online help.

    Monitor the Network with the ACC and AppScope

    Both the ACC and the AppScope allow you to monitor and report on the data recorded from traffic that traverses your network.
    The ACC on Panorama displays a summary of network traffic. Panorama can dynamically query data from all the managed firewalls on the network and display it in the ACC. This display allows you to monitor the traffic by applications, users, and content activity—URL categories, threats, security policies that effectively block data or files—across the entire network of Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls.
    The AppScope helps identify unexpected or unusual behavior on the network at a glance. It includes an array of charts and reports—Summary Report, Change Monitor, Threat Monitor, Threat Map, Network Monitor, Traffic Map—that allow you to analyze traffic flows by threat or application, or by the source or destination for the flows. You can also sort by session or byte count.
    Device Group and Template admins can only network and ACC data for device groups within their access domains.
    Use the ACC and the AppScope to answer questions such as:
    ACC
    Monitor > AppScope
    • What are the top applications used on the network and how many are high-risk applications? Who are the top users of high-risk applications on the network?
    • What are the top URL categories being viewed in the last hour?
    • What are the application usage trends—what are the top five applications that have gained use and the top five that have decreased in use?
    • How has user activity changed over the current week as compared to last week or last month?
    • What are the top bandwidth-using applications? Who are the users/hosts that consume the highest bandwidth?
    • What content or files are being blocked and are there specific users who trigger this File Blocking/Data Filtering rule?
    • What is the amount of traffic exchanged between two specific IP addresses or generated by a specific user? Where is the destination server or client located geographically?
    • Which users and applications take up most of the network bandwidth? And how has this consumption changed over the last 30 days?
    • What are the threats on the network, and how are these incoming and outgoing traffic threats distributed geographically?
    You can then use the information to maintain or enforce changes to the traffic patterns on your network. See Use Case: Monitor Applications Using Panorama for a glimpse into how the visibility tools on Panorama can influence how you shape the acceptable use policies for your network.
    Here are a few tips to help you navigate the ACC:
    ACC Navigation Tips
    • Switch from a Panorama view to a Device view—Use the Context drop-down to access the web interface of any managed firewall. For details, see Switch Context Between Panorama and Firewall Views.
    • Change Device Group and Data Source—The default Data Source used to display the statistics on the charts in the ACC is Panorama local data, and the default Device Group setting is All. Using the local data on Panorama provides a quick load time for the charts. You can, however, change the data source to Remote Device Data if all the managed firewalls are on PAN-OS 7.0 or a later release. If the managed firewalls have a mix of PAN-OS 7.0 and earlier releases, you can only view Panorama data. When configured to use Remote Device Data, Panorama will poll all the managed firewalls and present an aggregated view of the data. The onscreen display indicates the total number of firewalls being polled and the number of firewalls that have responded to the query for information.
    • Select the Tabs and Widgets to View—The ACC includes three tabs and an array of widgets that allow you to find the information that you care about. With the exception of the application usage widget and host information widget, all the other widgets display data only if the corresponding feature has been licensed on the firewall, and you have enabled logging.
    • Tweak Time Frame and Refine Data—The reporting time period in the ACC ranges from the last 15 minutes to the last hour, day, week, month, or any custom-defined time. By default, each widget displays the top 10 items and aggregates all the remaining items as others. You can sort the data in each widget using various attributes—for example, sessions, bytes, threats, content, and URLs. You can also set local filters to filter the display within the table and graph in a widget, and then promote the widget filter as a global filter to pivot the view across all the widgets in the ACC.

    Analyze Log Data

    The Monitor tab on Panorama provides access to log data; these logs are an archived list of sessions that have been processed by the managed firewalls and forwarded to Panorama.
    Log data can be broadly grouped into two types: those that detail information on traffic flows on your network such as applications, threats, host information profiles, URL categories, content/file types and those that record system events, configuration changes, and User-ID™ mapping information.
    Based on the log forwarding configuration on the managed firewalls, the MonitorLogs tab can include logs for traffic flows, threats, URL filtering, data filtering, host information profile (HIP) matches, and WildFire™ submissions. You can review the logs to verify a wealth of information on a given session or transaction. Some examples of this information are the user who initiated the session, the action (allow or deny) that the firewall performed on the session, and the source and destination ports, zones, and addresses. The System and Config logs can indicate a configuration change or an alarm that the firewall triggered when a configured threshold was exceeded.
    If Panorama will manage firewalls running software versions earlier than PAN-OS 7.0, specify a WildFire server from which Panorama can gather analysis information for WildFire samples that those firewalls submit. Panorama uses the information to complete WildFire Submissions logs that are missing field values introduced in PAN-OS 7.0. Firewalls running earlier releases won’t populate those fields. To specify the server, select PanoramaSetupWildFire, edit the General Settings, and enter the WildFire Private Cloud name. The default is wildfire-public-cloud, which is the WildFire cloud hosted in the United States.

    Generate, Schedule, and Email Reports

    You can configure reports to run immediately or schedule them to run at specific intervals. You can save and export the reports or email them to specific recipients. Emailing is particularly useful if you want to share reports with administrators who do not have access to Panorama. Panorama supports the same report types as the Palo Alto Networks firewall.
    Beginning with Panorama 10.0.2 and Cloud Services plugin version 1.8.0, you can generate scheduled reports on Strata Logging Service data. This setting is disabled by default and must be manually enabled on Panorama. This setting status (enabled or disabled) persists across PAN-OS upgrades, downgrades, and if you uninstall the Cloud Services plugin. To generate reports from Strata Logging Service data, you must first enable the feature from the Panorama CLI.
    It is recommended that you install matching software releases on Panorama and the firewalls for which you will generate reports. For example, if the Panorama management server runs Panorama 10.0, install PAN-OS 11.1 on its managed firewalls before generating the reports. This practice avoids issues that might occur if you create reports that include fields supported in the Panorama release but not supported in an earlier PAN-OS release on the firewalls.
    1. (Strata Logging Service only) Enable scheduled reports on Panorama.
      1. Log in to the Panorama CLI.
      2. Enable the scheduled reports setting.
        admin> request plugins cloud_services logging-service sched-report-enable
      3. Commit the configuration change.
        admin>  configure
        admin#  commit force
      4. Verify the scheduled report setting is enabled.
        admin> show system state | match sched-report
        The output displays cfg.report.lcass-sched-reports-enabled: True if enabled.
        The output displays cfg.report.lcass-sched-reports-enabled: False or will not return an output if disabled.
    2. Configure Panorama predefined reports.
      1. Select PanoramaSetupManagement and edit Logging and Reporting.
      2. Select Log Export and Reporting and enable (check) Use Data for Pre-Defined Reports to offload hourly report aggregation to Log Collectors.
        (Strata Logging Service only) This step is required to generate scheduled reports for logs stored on Strata Logging Service.
        Enabling this setting is recommended for VM-50, VM-50 Lite and PA-200 firewalls. Enabling this setting is optional for all other managed firewall models.
      3. Select Pre-Defined Reports and enable (check) predefined reports to push from Panorama.
      4. Select CommitCommit to Panorama and Commit your configuration changes.
      5. (VM-50, VM-50 Lite, and PA-200 firewalls only) Access the firewall CLI to enable predefined reports.
        This command must be run on each VM-50, VM-50 Lite, and PA-200 firewall. 
        admin> debug run-panorama-predefined-report yes
    3. Configure Panorama to receive and store user and user group information that it receives from firewalls.
      Required to generate reports based on usernames and groups instead of just IP addresses.
      1. If you want Panorama to include user group information in reports, upgrade the managed firewalls to PAN-OS 8.1 or a later release. Panorama cannot synchronize group information from firewalls running earlier releases.
      2. Select PanoramaSetupManagement, edit the Panorama Settings, and Enable reporting and filtering on groups.
      3. Add a Device Group if you haven’t already. For each device group:
        • Select a Master Device, which is the firewall that provides user and user group information to Panorama.
        • Enable Panorama to Store users and groups from Master Device.
    4. Generate reports.
      Scheduled and Run Now summary reports for the same database and timeframe have discrepancies in the data displayed in each report. This is due to how Log Collectors and firewalls aggregate logs during hourly aggregation.
      The steps to generate a report depend on the type.
      • Custom report:
        1. Select MonitorManage Custom Reports and Add the report.
        2. Enter a Name to identify the report.
        3. Select a Database for the report.
          You can base the report on Summary Databases or Detailed Logs databases.
          To base the report on logs stored on the Panorama management server and Log Collectors, select Panorama Data (recommended for faster performance).
          To base the reports on logs stored on the managed firewalls, select Remote Device Data. This option is for cases where the firewalls might have logs that were not yet forwarded to Panorama. However, because Panorama must query the firewalls directly, this option is slower.
        4. Select Scheduled.
        5. Define your log filtering criteria by selecting the Time Frame, Sort By order, Group By preference, and the columns (log attributes) that the report will display.
          Selecting the Sort By order is required in order to generate an accurate report. If you do not select a Sort By order, the generated custom report is populated with the most recent log matches for the selected database.
        6. From the Available Columns list, select the columns that you want to display in the report, and add them to the Selected Columns list.
          The columns that you add, appear in the Selected Column list. You must add at least one column to save or run the report.
          To generate scheduled reports, ensure that you add the field you selected in the Sort By list to the Selected Columns list.
        7. (Optional) Use the Query Builder to further refine the log filtering criteria based on log attributes.
        8. To test the report settings, select Run Now. If necessary, modify the settings to change the information that the report displays.
        9. Click OK to save the custom report.
      • PDF Summary Report:
        1. Select MonitorPDF ReportsManage PDF Summary and add the report.
        2. Enter a Name to identify the report.
        3. Use the drop-down for each report group and select one or more of the elements to design the PDF Summary Report. You can include up to 18 elements.
        4. Click OK to save the settings.
    5. Configure a Report Group.
      It can include predefined reports, PDF Summary reports, and custom reports. Panorama compiles all the included reports into a single PDF.
      1. Select MonitorPDF ReportsReport Groups and Add a report group.
      2. Enter a Name to identify the report group.
      3. (Optional) Select Title Page and add a Title for the PDF output.
      4. Select reports in the Predefined Report, Custom Report, and PDF Summary Report lists.
      5. Add the selected reports to the report group.
      6. Click OK to save the settings.
    6. Configure an Email server profile.
      The profile defines how the firewall connects to the server and sends email.
      1. Select PanoramaServer ProfilesEmail and Add a server profile.
      2. Enter a Name to identify the profile.
      3. Add up to four SMTP servers and Add the following information for each one:
        • Name—A name to identify the SMTP server (1 to 31 characters). This field is just a label and doesn’t have to be the hostname of an existing server.
        • Email Display Name—The name to display in the From field of the email.
        • From—The email address where notification emails will be sent from.
        • To—The email address to which notification emails will be sent.
        • Additional Recipient—To send notifications to a second account, enter the additional address here.
        • Email Gateway—The IP address or hostname of the SMTP gateway to use to send the emails.
      4. Click OK to save the profile.
    7. Schedule the report for email delivery.
      1. Select MonitorPDF ReportsEmail Scheduler and Add an email scheduler profile.
      2. Enter a Name to identify the profile.
      3. Select the Report Group, the Email server profile you just created (Email Profile), and the Recurrence for the report (default is Disable).
      4. Send test email to verify that the email settings are accurate.
      5. Click OK to save your changes.
      6. Select CommitCommit to Panorama and Commit your changes.

    Configure Key Limits for Scheduled Reports

    The Panorama™ management server and the PA-7000 Series firewall reports utilize keys (unique values on which you can aggregate) from one or more Log Collector to build and generate reports. To improve the accuracy of scheduled reports, you can now configurable the maximum and minimum key limits. By increasing the number of keys supported, scheduled reports can now include more data that can be aggregated, sorted, and grouped.
    The default minimum key limit is based on the Sort By and Group By values configured for the scheduled report using the following calculation:
    <Sort By value> x 100 x <Group By value>
    For example, if Sort By is configured as Top 25 and Group By is configured as 5 Groups, the default minimum key limit is 12,500 keys. The Group By value is not factored into the calculation when set to None. The default minimum key limit is limited to and cannot exceed the maximum key limit.
    You can only configure the key limits for the M-Series appliances and Panorama virtual appliances. The PA-7000 series key limits are not configurable.
    The supported maximum and minimum keys are increased for the following Panorama models:
    Panorama Model
    Minimum Key Limit
    Maximum Key Limit
    PA-7000 Series
    1,000 - Default, not configurable
    25,000 - Default, not configurable
    M-200
    15,000
    50,000
    M-500
    15,000
    50,000
    M-600
    15,000
    50,000
    Panorama Virtual Appliance in Legacy mode
    5,000
    25,000
    Panorama Virtual Appliance (all supported models)
    15,000
    50,000
    1. Log in to the Panorama CLI.
    2. Configure the maximum key limit using the following command:
      You can set the maximum key limit between 0 and 50, where 50 equals 50,000 keys. In this example, we are setting the maximum key limit for the Panorama virtual appliance to 30,000 keys. 
      admin@Panorama> request max-report-keys set limit <Key Limit>
    3. Configure the minimum key limit using the following command:
      You can set the minimum key limit between 0 and 15, where 15 equals 15,000 keys. In this example, we are setting the minimum key limit for the Panorama virtual appliance to 15,000 keys. 
      admin@Panorama> request min-report-keys set limit <Key Limit>
    4. (Optional) Set the minimum key limit to the default setting.
      admin@Panorama> request min-report-keys set limit 0
    5. Commit the new maximum and minimum key limits to Panorama using the following command:
      admin@Panorama> commit-all

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