topic Re: Monitoring Accessed URL's in General Topics

Monitoring Accessed URL's

rsaber — Sun, 09 Aug 2015 21:05:06 GMT

Hi Everyone,

We have the URL filtering license, I am trying to log all websites that a user access, however, I noticed PA only logs websites which the user fails to access due to a URL filtering policy, ie only websites that are blocked from the user because they fall under a blocked category.

Is there a way to log user access to all URL's.

Thanks

Re: Monitoring Accessed URL's

pulukas — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:50 GMT

You can get them to log by changing the category from allow to alert.

But be careful what you ask for, this will generate a lot of logs and reduce your overall logging time period as logs roll over when space is used up.

Re: Monitoring Accessed URL's

pankaku — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 18:46:21 GMT

Firewall will log the blocked website. But if you want to log the website that users have visited you have to set the action to alert for all URL category.

Re: Monitoring Accessed URL's

Brandon_Wertz — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 14:29:07 GMT

This is where Palo is doing a disservice to it's customer base. I'm not certain where this premise that "We should only log things that we want to deny" came from. The firewall is a security appliance. A device used for usage audit history and compliance verification.

It's annoying when I call into TAC and I get the same spiel from them about "Logging on session start"...well you know that is going to create a lot of logs. Since when is more information a bad thing? Using a firewall as it's intended wouldn't administrators need to be able to track back a source of infection?

If we're blocking every malicious thing from the beginning and nothing ever is miscategorized, not caught, or users never do anything bad then sure we don't need to log the "allowed" stuff. But we live in the real world. Where things are missed, malware gets by and users don't do what we want them to. It kind of difficult to triage incidents retroactively when there isn't even a log of the even occurring.

Sorry this didn't answer the question (it already has been), but it seems in general more and more comments are about "not logging" to reduce the performance hit or log retention when what should happen is administrators should bake these concerns into the original architecture and deploy a solution taking these concerns in mind.