According to the information provided by the vendor, Palo
Alto Panorama is a network security management solution that intends to
simplify and enhance cybersecurity processes for businesses. The product's
primary objective is to offer various features, including unified policy
management, centralized visibility, automated threat response, simplified
configuration, unrivaled scalability, and rapid security adoption. It claims to
assist organizations in efficiently managing their firewalls and…
$9,500
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
Rancid and Oxidized are the two other configuration management systems we've used. Both were open source and ran on Linux. They were useful, but they took a lot of extra work to configure and maintain. When Rancid stopped being supported we had to find a new product. We were …
I think Palo Alto Panorama is suited for administrators of all levels because certain things can be locked down to certain permission levels. But there are executive dashboards all the way down to the weeds for the highest of administrators. This truly is a single pane of glass tool because you never have to go into the individual firewalls for anything.
If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time
If you need to push a setting or config to multiple firewalls Panorama can do that flawlessly.
Panorama has its logging centralized and this makes it easy to locate and reviews logs compared to having to get logs from each device.
I love how the interface matches the interface on the firewall. This makes the learning curve less steep.
Adding new firewalls to Panorama is super easy and not complex. Panorama can push a lot of the config and settings so you don't have to manually do it.
The ability to push out OS updates could be improved in Panorama. It has the abilities, but the use is not intuitive, to the point that we generally connect directly to the firewalls to download the OS updates directly.
Scheduling. It would be nice to be able to schedule jobs to run at certain times. Pushing out updates, like OS updates mentioned above, can require significant bandwidth. So being able to schedule that work for hours that would not directly affect the users would be a welcome addition.
The list of devices in the Templates tabs should be sorted the same way that he devices are grouped in the Device Group tab, rather than just alphabetical. If there was a way to chose the order of the devices, maybe by tag, that would work as well.
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
Panorama has given us much more than we expected and the support for the product, by Palo Alto Networks has been great. We would like to see some improvements that I mentioned in another review, like scheduling changes, but overall Panorama has provided a very capable product and we are very happy with it.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
You can do anything via the GUI without going to the CLI. High real time security as every five minutes, it updates the list of phishing websites. High protection as the firewall communicates with the cloud, a machine running artificial intelligence helps to detect malware or other threats.
The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
Palo Alto has a very nice customer support. People are very nice and were quick to reply, whenever we had an issue with the subscription or the blacklist tool. There is also a great deal of information on their website that covers each and every detail about the uses and the threat signatures. The community keeps on updating their information very frequently. Small issues are easily solved from the documentation, and for other issues, the customer support service is always present. However, on Fridays it becomes a little delayed as per my observation.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
Palo Alto Panorama and Junos Space Security Director have many similar features but Palo Alto Panorama excels in almost all of them. The monitoring tools in Palo Alto Panorama are easy to use and give more in-depth insight into what is going on in your network. Palo Alto's security is ranked much higher and the Web Application Security is also superior to that of the Junos counterpart.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds already being our monitoring tool made the decision easy. Time is at a premium in small teams and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very easy to use right out of the box without all the tweaking required by powerful command line driven tools like Ansible.
At a previous company, I deployed Palo Alto firewalls to a data center, and 12 branch locations. This allowed us to replace MPLS links with IPSec tunnels between the sites. This resulted in significantly more throughput and soft savings of increased productivity. However, the estimated net of $220,000 in hard savings over five years is what is most impressive. I could not have effectively managed all those devices without Palo Alto Panorama.
