topic Re: URLs visited in General Topics

URLs visited

E.Berrocal — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 17:24:31 GMT

We use Palo Alto firewalls PA3020. How can I generate a report that shows how many times a URL has been visited? Also, can we see who visited the URL? Thanks!

Re: URLs visited

Brandon_Wertz — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 20:03:56 GMT

@E.Berrocal wrote:

We use Palo Alto firewalls PA3020. How can I generate a report that shows how many times a URL has been visited? Also, can we see who visited the URL? Thanks!

If you're looking to do this to determine someone's "productivity" or define what someone might have been doing in a given time window Palo's URL logs aren't necessarily going to be the best route. There is a lot of nesting that happens with websites. Someone might be going to "ESPN" as example but there could be a widget on the page that links to Facebook. Palo will create a hit for that user going to Facebook, when in reality the site they visited was ESPN and not Facebook.

So my call out is be careful for using a URL report as proof of someone's Internet activity.

That said you can easily create the report in:

Monitoring --> Manage Custom Reports --> Create your custom report.

I've highlighted the fields you'll want to adjust depending on what you're looking for. You can also use the query builder below to get more specific on what you're looking for.

Re: URLs visited

BPry — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 23:13:21 GMT

@E.Berrocal,

Just want to really back up what @Brandon_Wertz's already mentioned; these logs are not a good a good indicator of anything without heavy analysis which you wouldn't get in a report. Modern browsers will also preload/prefetch content to the point where URL logs directly are not declarative of someone ever visiting the resource in question.