Strata Cloud Manager
Strata Cloud Manager Licenses
Table of Contents
Strata Cloud Manager Licenses
Strata Cloud Manager supports two new licensing tiers: Essentials and Pro. Learn
about what's supported for each and how to get started.
| Where Can I Use This? | What Do I Need? |
|---|---|
| One of these: If you began using Strata Cloud Manager before these
licensing tiers were introduced, your licenses remain
supported. |
Strata Cloud Manager provides AI-powered, unified management and operations for
your NGFWs and Prisma Access. The features and capabilities available to you in Strata
Cloud Manager depend on your licenses.
Strata Cloud Manager has two licensing tiers: Strata Cloud Manager Essentials
and Strata Cloud Manager Pro.
- Strata Cloud Manager Essentials is available for free with any NGFW purchase
- Strata Cloud Manager Pro (which includes all Essentials features) can be added on to an NGFW purchase, and is included with Prisma Access
Both licenses unlock a range of network security features and management tools
to optimize NGFW and Prisma Access operations. Here is a brief comparison of features
available with Strata Cloud Manager Essentials and Strata Cloud Manager Pro.
Important:
Before we introduced Strata Cloud Manager Essentials and Pro, the AIOps for NGFW and
Prisma Access licenses gave you access to Strata Cloud Manager. If you have AIOps for
NGFW or activated Prisma Access before the two new licensing tiers were introduced,
there is no impact, and you can continue to amend, extend, or renew your licenses:
- If you're already using Strata Cloud Manager and have AIOps for NGFW Free, AIOps for NGFW Premium, Prisma Access, or Autonomous DEM, your existing licenses are not impacted and you can continue to amend, extend, or renew them.
- Strata Cloud Manager Essentials and Strata Cloud Manager Pro are not yet available to activate in customer support portal (CSP) accounts that already have: Strata Logging Service with sized storage, AIOps for NGFW Free or Premium, or Prisma Access.
Strata Cloud Manager Essentials
Learn about Strata Cloud Manager Essentials that provides management and security
features, and the features that are available to you for free.
Strata Cloud Manager Essentials provides management and security features, and
these features are available to you free with:
- Any Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) purchase ( including VM Series funded by Software NGFW Credits).
- Prisma Access licenses include Strata Cloud Manager Pro, which includes all Essentials features, too.
Strata Logging Service is available as
an optional add-on for Strata Cloud Manager Essentials. Strata Logging Service provides
centralized log storage and retrieval across your entire NGFW and Prisma Access
deployment, but you must purchase it separately from Strata Cloud Manager
Essentials.
Here are the features Strata Cloud Manager Essentials gives you:
- Command Center and Activity Insights provide interactive dashboards that help you to know how Palo Alto Networks security services are protecting your network. You can interact with data on the applications, threats, users, and security subscriptions at work in your network.
- Configuration and Policy Management for NGFW and SASE provides centralized configuration management across all your firewalls and SASE environments. This ensures consistent security policy enforcement and simplifies administrative tasks.
- Best Practices Reporting helps you adopt NGFW and SASE services quickly by providing tools and recommendations to align configurations with industry best practices, improving the overall security posture.
- Health Insights and Alerts provide fundamental insights into the operational health of Prisma Access and NGFWs. These insights include deployment-wide status updates, key metrics such as traffic volumes, and proactive identification of potential hardware or software issues.
Strata Cloud Manager Pro
Learn about Strata Cloud Manager Pro.
Strata Cloud Manager Pro provides advanced features on top of the Essentials
license. Strata Cloud Manager Pro includes Strata Logging Service, unlike the
Essentials version, and one year of log retention.
- You can purchase Strata Cloud Manager Pro with Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW), including VM Series funded by Software NGFW Credits.
- A Prisma Access license includes Strata Cloud Manager Pro.
Here are the features Strata Cloud Manager Pro gives you:
- All the features available in Strata Cloud Manager Essentials.
- Strata Logging Service with one year of log retention and unlimited storage, enabling centralized logging and seamless data retrieval across your deployment.
- AI-Powered Observability with ADEM: Strata Cloud Manager Pro integrates Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) for holistic observability across your network. ADEM helps to automate complex IT operations, reduce ticket volume, and shorten the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
- Real-time inline best practices provide proactive, context-aware recommendations directly within the web interface as you configure and manage security policies. This feature ensures that your configurations align with industry standards and Palo Alto Networks' security best practices, reducing misconfigurations and enhancing your overall security posture.
- AI-Powered Policy Analysis leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze your security policies in real time, providing actionable insights to optimize, streamline, and strengthen your security posture. This feature automates the evaluation of complex policy sets, helping administrators make informed decisions to improve network security and performance.
- AI-Powered Operational Health includes enhanced operational health capabilities designed to anticipate and prevent issues before they impact your network. For example, forecasting and anomaly detection in alerts, Root Cause Analysis in alerts, and Capacity Analyzer.
- Software Upgrade Planner analyzes the features enabled on firewalls and provides a customized recommendation. You can create upgrade recommendations to identify the best software version for upgrading your devices.
Strata Cloud Manager Essentials and Pro Feature Support
Learn about the features supported for Strata Cloud Manager Essentials and Pro
licenses.
| Feature Set | Strata Cloud Manager Essentials | Strata Cloud Manager Essentials + Strata Logging Service | Strata Cloud Manager Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operational Health | |||
| Hardware Health Alerts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Software and licensing Alerts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment specific Alerts | No | No | Yes |
| Forecasting and Anomaly detection in Alerts | No | No | Yes |
| Root Cause Analysis in Alerts | No | No | Yes |
| In-product support ticket creation (Alert Specific) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment wide status and metric trends | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Capacity Analyzer | No | No | Yes |
| Software Upgrade Planner | No | No | Yes |
| Service Now Integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Security Posture | |||
| Best Practices Analysis | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| On-demand BPA | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Configuration Checks | No | No | Yes |
| Compliance | No | No | Yes |
| Real-time and Proactive best practices with enforcement | No | No | Yes |
| Policy Analyzer (ML) | No | No | Yes |
| Policy Optimizer (ML) | No | No | Yes |
| Config Cleanup | No | No | Yes |
| Configuration Management | |||
| Cloud Management for NGFW | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud Management for Prisma Access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud Management for standalone SD-WAN | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud Management for other licensed CDSS subscriptions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Rule Hit Count within the Cloud Manager configuration | No | Yes | Yes |
| Configuration exceptions from logs | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata Logging Service | |||
| Retention (1 year default) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Log Forwarding | No | Yes | Yes |
| Visualization and Reporting Dashboards | |||
| Custom dashboards | No | Yes | Yes |
| Command Center | No | Yes | Yes |
| Activity Insights | No | Yes | Yes |
| Executive Summary dashboard | No | Yes | Yes |
| WildFire dashboard | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| DNS security dashboard | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| DLP Incidents dashboard | No | Yes | Yes |
| SaaS Security dashboard | No | Yes | Yes |
| Log Viewer | No | Yes | Yes |
| IOC Search | No | Yes | Yes |
| SASE Health | No | Yes | Yes |
| Prisma Access Usage | No | Yes | Yes |
| Reports | No | Yes | Yes |
| SD-WAN Dashboard | No | Yes | Yes |
| IoT Dashboard | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| CASB-X Dashboard | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Branch Sites | No | Yes | Yes |
| Data Centers | No | Yes | Yes |
| Network Services | No | Yes | Yes |
| Prisma Access Locations | No | Yes | Yes |