Enable CloudWatch Monitoring on the VM-Series Firewall on
AWS
The VM-Series firewall on AWS can publish
native PAN-OS metrics to AWS CloudWatch, which you can use to monitor
the firewalls. These metrics allow you to assess performance and
usage patterns that you can use to take action for launching or
terminating instances of the VM-Series firewalls.
The firewalls
use AWS APIs to publish the metric to a
namespace
on
AWS at a specified time interval. The namespace is the location
to which CloudWatch collects and aggregates the selected metric
for all instances configured to use the namespace. You can then
monitor the metric in CloudWatch or create auto scaling policies
to trigger alarms and take an action to manually deploy a new instance
of the firewall when the monitored metric reaches a threshold value.
Refer to the AWS CloudWatch and Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) documentation
on best practices for setting the alarm conditions for a scale out
or scale in action.The VM-Series firewall can publish any
of the following PAN-OS metrics to CloudWatch:
Metric | Description |
|---|---|
Dataplane CPU Utilization (%) | Monitors the dataplane CPU usage to measure
the traffic load on the firewall. |
Dataplane Packet Buffer Utilization (%) | Monitors the dataplane buffer usage to measure
buffer utilization. If you have a sudden burst in traffic, monitoring
buffer utilization allows you to ensure that the firewall does not
deplete the dataplane buffer and drop packets. |
Session Utilization (%) | Monitors the sessions are currently active
for TCP, UDP, ICMP and SSL and the packet rate, new connection establish
rate, and throughput on the firewall to determine session utilization. |
SSLProxyUtilization (%) | Monitors the percentage of SSL forward proxy
sessions with clients for SSL/TLS decryption. |
GlobalProtect Gateway Tunnel Utilization
(%) | Monitors the active GlobalProtect tunnels
set up on a gateway to measure tunnel utilization. Use this metric
if the VM-Series firewall is deployed as a VPN gateway on AWS to
secure remote users. |
Total Active Sessions | Monitors the total number of sessions that
are active on the firewall. An active session is a session that
is on the firewall’s flow lookup table for which packets will be
inspected and forwarded, as required by policy. |
GlobalProtect Gateway Active Tunnels | Monitors the number of active GlobalProtect
sessions on a firewall deployed as a GlobalProtect gateway. Use
this metric if the VM-Series firewall is deployed a VPN gateway
on AWS to secure remote users; check the datasheet for the maximum
number of active tunnels supported for your firewall model. |
- Assign the appropriate permissions for the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user role that you use to deploy the VM-Series firewall on AWS.Whether you newly Launch the VM-Series Firewall on AWS or upgrade an existing VM-Series firewall on AWS to PAN-OS 8.0, the IAM role associated with your instance must have permissions to publish metrics to CloudWatch.
- On the AWS console, select IAM.
- Edit the IAM role to grant the following permissions:
- Enable CloudWatch on the VM-Series firewall on AWS.
- Log in to the web interface on the VM-Series firewall
- Select .
- SelectEnable CloudWatch Monitoring.
- Enter theCloudWatch Namespaceto which the firewall can publish metrics. The namespace cannot begin withAWS.
- Set theUpdate Intervalto a value between 1-60 minutes. This is the frequency at which the firewall publishes the metrics to CloudWatch. The default is 5 minutes.
- Committhe changes.Until the firewall starts to publish metrics to CloudWatch, you cannot configure alarms for PAN-OS metrics.
- Verify that you can see the metrics on CloudWatch.
- On the AWS console, select , to view CloudWatch metrics by category.
- From the Custom Metrics drop-down, select the namespace.
- Verify that you can see PAN-OS metrics in the viewing list.
- Configure alarms and action for PAN-OS metrics on CloudWatch.Refer to the AWS documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/AlarmThatSendsEmail.htmlA VM-Series firewall with bootstrap configuration will take about 7-9 minutes to be available for service. So, here are some examples on how to set alarms that trigger auto scaling for the VM-Series firewall:
- If you have deployed 2 instances of the VM-Series firewalls as Global Protect Gateways that secure remote users, use the GlobalProtect Gateway Active Tunnels metric. You can configure an alarm for when the number of active tunnels is greater than 300 for 15 minutes, you can deploy 2 new instances of the VM-Series firewall, which are bootstrapped and configured to serve as Global Protect Gateways.
- If you are using the firewall to secure your workloads in AWS, use the Session Utilization metric to scale in or scale out the firewall based on resource usage. You can configure an alarm for when the session utilization metric is greater than 60% for 15 minutes, to deploy one instance of the VM-Series instance firewall. And conversely, if Session Utilization is less than 50% for 30 minutes, terminate an instance of the VM-Series firewall.
