Palo Alto Panorama - A Must-have Tool for Administrators of Multiple Palo Alto Firewalls
May 09, 2019
Palo Alto Panorama - A Must-have Tool for Administrators of Multiple Palo Alto Firewalls
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Palo Alto Panorama
Palo Alto Panorama is used by our network security team to manage all configurations for six Palo Alto firewalls on three different sites. It allows the members of our team to keep consistent configurations across these devices and to re-use certain policies rather than creating them individually on each device. This also helps us ensure that we have backups of the firewall configurations. We also use Panorama to aggregate firewall logs. Searching logs in Panorama is much faster than searching on the firewalls themselves, so it's a big time saver. The fact that we can give members of other teams, such as our SOC or networking teams limited access to view configurations without giving them direct access to the firewalls themselves is a good way to keep information available but still maintain separation of duties.
- Quick searching and filtering of logs from all your firewalls simultaneously, which helps track down the traffic of interest on any device.
- The interface matches the PANOS interface on the firewall, so you don't have to re-learn a whole new way of doing things (there is an additional tab for Panorama settings).
- Supports multiple authentication methods, including SAML and RADIUS, so it's possible to secure it with multi-factor authentication.
- Stackable templates make it easy to re-use common device configurations on multiple firewalls, and hierarchical device groups make it easy to apply policies to select or all devices at once.
- Applied filters on various sections are persistent between administrative sessions.
- Has a tendency to log out management sessions unexpectedly.
- Occasionally requires multiple login attempts to load administrative session.
- Occasionally, pushing PANOS updates to firewalls from Panorama simply fails.
- 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.