Tag Archives: API

Editing Palo Configs by Scripts: pan-os-php

Palo Alto Networks, Tutorial/Howto, , , , , , ,

There are recurring cases where tasks cannot be edited quickly and easily using the classic Palo Alto Networks GUI or Panorama. For example, editing multiple policies at once, such as during a zone migration. Or checking which policies haven’t log forwarding enabled, hence enabling it directly. Or finding unused objects, including deleting them.

For these situations (and many more!), there’s a tool with a wealth of predefined scripts: pan-os-php. This first blog post covers installation and some initial use cases.

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Which KPIs to monitor on a Palo Alto Firewall?

Monitoring, Palo Alto Networks, , , , , ,

We wanted to monitor some of our Palo firewalls from our monitoring system via the API. But: Which enhanced metrics/KPIs shall we monitor? While there are some obvious ones such as interface counters, uptime, software versions, license expiry dates, or HA-states, we dug a little deeper to get more out of it, such as mgmt-/data-plane stats, packet rates, drop counters (all global counters?), and routing entries.

Here are some ideas on which values a monitoring system could observe. I’m listing the required API calls along with some demo values that can be used to develop monitoring tools/scripts.

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Getting started with the APIs from Palo Alto Ntwks

API, Palo Alto Networks, Tutorial/Howto, , , , ,

You can talk to firewalls and Panorama from Palo Alto Networks in various ways. The well-known GUI (which I really love, by the way) and the CLI are quite common at first glance. Nearly everyone using the Palos is familiar with these configuration options.

When it comes to automation at some point, either to configure those devices or just to read out some KPIs for your monitoring, APIs are in place. Plural because Palo has two APIs: The so-called “XML API” and the “REST API“. Let’s get started with both of them:

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