topic Re: URL Logging - only custom allowed domains are showing up in General Topics

URL Logging - only custom allowed domains are showing up

Netzer — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 05:42:09 GMT

Hi there,

I'm trying to get URL logging to work.

At first: I don't have the advanced url filtering license, maybe that's why....

I have got a custom url category with some domains which I want to allow, those urls in this list are logged fine.

Everything else should be blocked and logged but for those situations the logging doesn't show anything, even though the block action itself works as expected.

My url filtering profile is attached as screenshot.

The url filtering profile is applied on the corresponding security rule (action tab -> profile settings -> url filtering

Any hint why it doesn't work?

Re: URL Logging - only custom allowed domains are showing up

aleksandar.astardzhiev — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 09:24:38 GMT

Hi @Netzer ,

If you don't have advanced url filtering license, what other licenses do you have applied on this firewall?

In this URL profile do you have any pre-defined category that are set to alert/allow and are indeed allowed, you your are trying to block everything and allow only the custom one?

Re: URL Logging - only custom allowed domains are showing up

Netzer — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 10:45:46 GMT

I just have Threat Prevention on this device.

Right, all pre defined urls are set to block and my custom url list is set to allow/alert.

The result should be that all domains are logged, but only the domains in my custom list got logged.

Re: URL Logging - only custom allowed domains are showing up

aleksandar.astardzhiev — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:32:02 GMT

Hi @Netzer,

Advanced URL Filtering license is needed for the firewall to use PAN-DB pre-defined categories.

URL categorization is done in real time by FW sending queries to Palo Alto cloud and ask what category is the URL that it just got saw in the traffic. Without such license your FW is not allowed to query/ask the cloud, so it wouldn't know that category each URL belongs to.

So my guess is that URLs are blocked, not because you set the pre-defined categories to block, but because the one (or two) particular categories are set to block - not-resolved (and probably unknown). You could probably test my theory if you set all other pre-defined categories - accept those two - to alert/allow and see if you still see URLs being blocked.

Back to the logs - I am almost certain that the lack of url filtering license is again the reason you don't see logs for URLs that are not matching your custom category.