VM-Series Deployment Guide
    : Set Up the Azure Plugin for Monitoring on Panorama
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    6. Set Up the Azure Plugin for Monitoring on Panorama
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    VM-Series Deployment Guide

    Set Up the Azure Plugin for Monitoring on Panorama

    Table of Contents

    Set Up the Azure Plugin for Monitoring on Panorama

    To start collecting IP address-to-tag mapping, set up the Monitoring agent to execute as a cron task.
    To find all the workloads that your organization has deployed in the Azure cloud, you need to install the Azure plugin on Panorama and configure Monitoring Definitions that enable Panorama to authenticate to your Azure subscription(s) and retrieve information on the Azure workloads. Panorama retrieves the primary private IP address of Azure resources and the associated tags. For a list of the metadata elements that Panorama supports, see Attributes Monitored Using the Panorama Plugin on Azure.
    After Panorama fetches the attributes, to push the resource information from Panorama to the firewalls, you must add the firewalls (hardware or VM-Series) as managed devices on Panorama, and group the firewalls into one or more Device Groups. You can then specify which device groups are part of the Notify Group, which is a configuration element in a Monitoring Definition, that Panorama uses to register the IP address-to-tag mapping it retrieves from Azure.
    Finally, to consistently enforce Security policies across your Azure workloads, you must set up Dynamic Address Groups and reference them in policy rules that allow or deny traffic to the IP addresses of the Azure resources. For streamlining your configuration and managing policies and objects centrally from Panorama, you can define the Dynamic Address Groups and Security policy rules on Panorama and push them to the firewalls instead of managing the Dynamic Address Groups and Security policy rules locally on each firewall.
    The Azure plugin is for monitoring Azure resources on the Azure public cloud. Azure Government or Azure China are not supported.

    Planning Checklist for Monitoring with the Azure Plugin

    • Set up the Active Directory application and a Service Principal to enable API access—For Panorama to interact with the Azure APIs and collect information on your workloads, you need to create an Azure Active Directory Service Principal. This Service Principal has the permissions required to authenticate to the Azure AD and access the resources within your subscription.
      To complete this set up, you must have permissions to register an application with your Azure AD tenant, and assign the application to a role in your subscription. If you don't have the necessary permissions, ask your Azure AD or subscription administrator to create a Service Principal with an IAM role of reader or the custom permissions specified in VM-Series on Azure Service Principal Permissions.
    • Make sure that the subscription ID is unique across Service Principals. Panorama allows you to use only one service principal to monitor an Azure subscription. You can monitor up to 100 Azure subscriptions, with 100 Service principal resources. Starting with Panorama plugin for Azure version 3.2.0, you can monitor up to 500 Azure subscriptions. Take note of the processing times described in the table below.
      Number of Subscriptions
      100200300400500
      System Resources Utilization
      • CPU: 22%
      • Memory: 0.025 MB
      • CPU: 23.8%
      • Memory: 0.025 MB
      • CPU: 31.8%
      • Memory: 0.025 MB
      • CPU: 28.6%
      • Memory: 0.025 MB
      • CPU: 39.2%
      • Memory: 0.025 MB
      Average Time to Process All Monitoring Definitions
      1 Hour, 15 Minutes
      2 Hours, 30 Minutes
      3 Hours, 30 Minutes
      4 Hours
      5 Hours
      Average Tag Update Processing Time
      5 minutes
      10 minutes
      15 minutes
      20 minutes
      25 minutes
      The information in the table above was captured on an instance with 8 vCPUs and 32GB of memory.
    • Panorama can push up to 8000 IP address-to tag mappings to the firewalls or virtual system assigned to a device group. Review the requirements for Panorama and the managed firewalls:
      • Minimum system requirements (see the Panorama Plugin information in the Compatibility Matrix):
        Panorama virtual appliance or hardware-based Panorama appliance running Panorama 8.1.3 or later, with an active support license and a device management license for managing firewalls.
        Licensed next-generation firewalls running PAN-OS 8.0 or 8.1.
      • You must add the firewalls as managed devices on Panorama and create Device Groups so that you can configure Panorama to notify these groups with the information it retrieves. Device groups can include VM-Series firewalls or virtual systems on the hardware firewalls.
      • The number of tags that the Panorama plugin can retrieve and register is as follows:
        On Panorama running 8.1.3 or later managing firewalls running PAN-OS 8.1.3 or lower, the firewalls or virtual systems included within a device group can have 7000 IP addresses with 10 tags each, or 6500 IP addresses with 15 tags each.
        On Panorama 8.1.3 or later managing firewalls running PAN-OS 8.0.x, 2500 IP addresses with 10 tags each.
        • If your Panorama appliances are in a high availability configuration, you must manually install the same version of the Azure plugin on both Panorama peers.
          You configure the Azure plugin on the active Panorama peer only. On commit, the configuration is synced to the passive Panorama peer. Only the active Panorama peer polls the Azure subscriptions you have configured for Monitoring.

    Install the Azure Plugin

    To get started with Monitoring on Azure, you need to download and install the Azure plugin on Panorama. If you have a Panorama HA configuration, repeat this installation process on each Panorama peer.
    If you currently have installed a Panorama plugin, the process of installing (or uninstalling) another plugin requires a Panorama reboot to enable you to commit changes. So, install additional plugins during a planned maintenance window to allow for a reboot.
    If you have a standalone Panorama or two Panorama appliances installed in an HA pair with multiple plugins installed, plugins might not receive updated IP-tag information if one or more of the plugins is not configured. This occurs because Panorama will not forward IP-tag information to unconfigured plugins. Additionally, this issue can occur if one or more of the Panorama plugins is not in the Registered or Success state (positive state differs on each plugin). Ensure that your plugins are in the positive state before continuing or executing the commands described below.
    If you encounter this issue, there are two workarounds:
    • Uninstall the unconfigured plugin or plugins. It is recommended that you do not install a plugin that you do not plan to configure right away
    • You can use the following commands to work around this issue. Execute the following command for each unconfigured plugin on each Panorama instance to prevent Panorama from waiting to send updates. If you do not, your firewalls may lose some IP-tag information.
      request plugins dau plugin-name <plugin-name> unblock-device-push yes
      You can cancel this command by executing:
      request plugins dau plugin-name <plugin-name> unblock-device-push no
    The commands described are not persistent across reboots and must be used again for any subsequent reboots. For Panorama in HA pair, the commands must be executed on each Panorama.
    1. Log in to the Panorama Web Interface, select PanoramaPlugins and click Check Now to get the list of available plugins.
    2. Select Download and Install the plugin.
      After you successfully install, Panorama refreshes and the Azure plugin displays on the Panorama tab.
    3. Restart Panorama.
      Select PanoramaSetupOperationsReboot Panorama

    Configure the Azure Plugin for Monitoring

    Retrieve information for your Azure workloads, use the match criteria filters to define Dynamic Address groups and enforce Security policy.
    To begin monitoring the resources in your Azure public cloud deployment, after you Install the Azure Plugin you must create a Monitoring Definition. This definition specifies the Service Principal that is authorized to access the resources within the Azure subscription you want to monitor and the Notify Group that includes the firewalls to which Panorama should push all the IP-address-to-tag mappings it retrieves. In order to enforce policy, you must then create Dynamic Address Groups and reference them in Security policy. The Dynamic Address Groups enable you to filter the tags you want to match on, so that the firewall can get the primary private IP address registered for the tags, and then allow or deny access to traffic to and from the workloads based on the policy rules you define.
    1. Log in to the Panorama web interface.
    2. Set up the following objects for enabling Monitoring on Azure.
      • Add a Service Principal.
        The Service Principal is the service account that you created on the Azure portal. This account is attached to the Azure AD and has limited permissions to access and monitor the resources in your Azure subscription.
        1. Select PanoramaPluginsAzureSetupService PrincipalAdd.
          While configuring the monitoring definition, ensure that you attach the parent DG to the plugin notify-group and that all children DGs are unattached from the notify group.
          To ensure that the DAU propagates all IP tags from parent DG to children DGs that are connected to the firewall, run the command debug dau settings device-group recursive yes on Panorama CLI
        2. Enter a Name and optionally a Description to identify the service account.
        3. Enter the Subscription ID for the Azure subscription you want to monitor. You must login to your Azure portal to get this subscription ID.
        4. Enter the Client Secret and re-enter it to confirm.
        5. Enter the Tenant ID. The tenant ID is the Directory ID you saved when you set up the Active Directory application.
        6. Click Validate to verify that the keys and IDs you entered are valid ,and Panorama can communicate with the Azure subscription using the API.
      • Add a notify group.
        1. Select PanoramaPluginsAzureSetupNotify GroupsAdd.
        2. Enter a Name and optionally a Description to identify the group of firewalls to which Panorama pushes the information it retrieves.
        3. Select the Device Groups, which are a group of firewalls or virtual systems, to which Panorama will push the information (IP address-to-tag mapping) it retrieves from your Azure subscriptions. The firewalls use the update to determine the most current list of members that constitute dynamic address groups referenced in policy.
        4. Select the option Select All Tags or Custom Tags.
          bles you to specify the labels that you prefer and generate required tags. You must enter the key of the user tag to configure the user tags.
          For example:
          If your virtual machine (VM) on Azure cloud is tagged as UserID with a value SampleValue, enter UserID under the user tags. You can then see that azure.tag.UserID.SampleValue is populated as the user tag.
          You must think through your Device Groups carefully because a Monitoring Definition can include only one notify group, make sure to select all the relevant Device Groups within your notify group. If you want to deregister the tags that Panorama has pushed to a firewall included in a notify group, you must delete the Monitoring Definition.
          To register tags to all virtual systems on a firewall enabled for multiple virtual systems, you must add each virtual system to a separate device group on Panorama and assign the device groups to the notify group. Panorama will register tags to only one virtual system, if you assign all the virtual systems to one device group.
        5. Click OK.
        6. Verify that monitoring is enabled on the plugin. This setting must be enabled for Panorama to communicate with the Azure public cloud for Monitoring.
          The checkbox for Enable Monitoring is on PanoramaPluginsAzureSetupGeneral.
    3. Create a Monitoring Definition.
      When you add a new Monitoring definition, it is enabled by default.
      • Select PanoramaPluginsAzureMonitoring Definition, to Add a new definition.
      • Enter a Name and optionally a Description to identify the Azure subscription for which you use this definition.
      • Select the Service Principal and Notify Group.
        Panorama requires the keys and IDs that you specify in the Service Principal configuration to generate an Azure Bearer Token which is used in the header of the API call to collect information on your workloads.
        • The Panorama plugin for Azure 5.1.0 supports one service principal for multiple monitoring definitions.
        • The Panorama plugin for Azure 5.0.0 or below version, does not support one service principal for multiple monitoring definitions.
      • Select the Azure Regions
        .
        No two monitoring definitions can have exactly the same Service Principal and Region configured. The plugin will fail the commit operation for monitoring definitions that have the same Service Principal and Region configured.
    4. Commit the changes on Panorama.
      Verify that the status for the Monitoring Definition displays as Success. If it fails, verify that you entered the Azure Subscription ID accurately and provided the correct keys and IDs for the Service Principal.
      You can select a monitoring definition and click Dashboard to view the tag details of a monitoring definition.
      The location filter on the Monitoring Definition Detailed Status dialogue box filters the dashboard details by location.
      Click more to view the IP address of the tag and then go to Associated tags to view all tags associated with this IP address.
    5. Verify that you can view the information on Panorama, and define the match criteria for Dynamic Address Groups.
      Some browser extensions may block API calls between Panorama and Azure which prevents Panorama from receiving match criteria. If Panorama displays no match criteria and you are using browser extensions, disable the extensions and Synchronize Dynamic Objects to populate the tags available to Panorama.
      On HA failover, the newly active Panorama attempts to reconnect to the Azure cloud and retrieve tags for all monitoring definitions. If there is an error with reconnecting even one monitoring definition, Panorama generates a system log message 
      Unable to process subscriptions after HA switch-over; user-intervention required.
      When you see this error, you must log in to Panorama and fix the issue, for example remove an invalid subscription or provide valid credentials, and commit your changes to enable Panorama to reconnect and retrieve the tags for all monitoring definitions. Even when Panorama is disconnected from the Azure cloud, the firewalls have the list of all tags that had been retrieved before failover, and can continue to enforce policy on that list of IP addresses. Panorama removes all tags associated with the subscription only when you delete a monitoring definition. As a best practice, to monitor this issue, configure action-oriented log forwarding to an HTTPS destination from Panorama so that you can take immediate action.

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