topic Re: Sizing PA Devices in General Topics

Sizing PA Devices

dept_tec_bcn — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:44:35 GMT

I need to know if there is any report/graf in PA that shows the throughput peak, simultaneus session peak, in a custom time period. This would be great for sizing equipment after analizing the traffic of a costumer during some days. It will be very usefull to know how are you using your equipment and the grow prosibilities you have.

I have been looking in PA reports and found no information about throuput, session, cpd usage peaks.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Albert

Re: Sizing PA Devices

mikand — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:21:15 GMT

I think there would be some custom report you should be able to setup to get these figures but I guess you want them more in realtime?

Using netflow export could be one way to achieve this, otherwise I think snmp is the way to go (device -> setup -> operations). The PAN-MIB modules are available at the Technical Documentation page here at support.paloaltonetworks.com.

In PAN-COMMON-MIB.my you have stuff such as (shortened):

-- Session

    panSessionUtilization OBJECT-TYPE
        DESCRIPTION
            "Session table utilization percentage. Values should
            be between 0 and 100."

    panSessionMax OBJECT-TYPE
        DESCRIPTION
            "Total number of sessions supported."

    panSessionActive OBJECT-TYPE
        DESCRIPTION
            "Total number of active sessions."

    panSessionActiveTcp OBJECT-TYPE
        DESCRIPTION
            "Total number of active TCP sessions."

    panSessionActiveUdp OBJECT-TYPE
        DESCRIPTION
            "Total number of active UDP sessions."

    panSessionActiveICMP OBJECT-TYPE
        DESCRIPTION
            "Total number of active ICMP sessions."

Once you have the utilization over time you can check the datasheets to select a proper hardware depending on wallet size and stuff like that 😃

Re: Sizing PA Devices

dept_tec_bcn — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:32:58 GMT

Thanks for the answer, but what i really want to know if there is any historic of the throughput, sessions and cpu usage.

I don't know if i have a PAN device connected in tap mode during 1 week and i want to know the maximum concurrent sessions, througput or cpu usage it had during this week. I could no find something like that in custom reports. Any idea?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Sizing PA Devices

koen_peetermans — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:39:59 GMT

You might consider using SNMP / Cacti for that, maybe not the answer you were looking for, but IMO those are ideal for this kind of monitoring. That's what I personally use.

Re: Sizing PA Devices

gafrol — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:22:27 GMT

We are using PRTG for long term monitoring cpu, bandwidth, sessions etc. of our PA boxes. I can highly recommend PRTG very easy to setup and use also for netflow data exports and all kind of other stuff including xml API to talk to PA.

Roland