topic Rule Counters on HA Pair With Transfered Sessions in General Topics

Rule Counters on HA Pair With Transfered Sessions

Knobdy — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 23:57:39 GMT

Let us say you have a firewall pair configured and rules configured and one day you fail them over - or they fail over. The primary is rebooted. When the primary comes back up all sessions are transferred back and everything is fine. Except, as I understand it, the only time rule counters are reset is after a reboot (or the backplane is restarted). So if those sessions are never again dropped, and thus never hit the rule allowing them again, that rule may appear as unused.

Is this correct and, if so, is there a way to resovle it for a rule-base review - to know which rules are really not being used and avoid disabling "unused rules" that are really just maintaining their sessions between failovers?

Re: Rule Counters on HA Pair With Transfered Sessions

mlinsemier — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:09:41 GMT

What you really want is a new feature in PAN-OS 8.1, but I wouldn't recommend installing it quite yet.

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/documentation/81/pan-os/newfeaturesguide/management-features/rule-usage-tracking

Re: Rule Counters on HA Pair With Transfered Sessions

Knobdy — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:12:32 GMT

So I’m correct...that’s not good.

Re: Rule Counters on HA Pair With Transfered Sessions

OtakarKlier — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:17:42 GMT

Hello @Knobdy,

You are indeed correct. Once a PAN reboots, the counters are reset to 0 regardless of current sessions on the other HA unit. I agree with @mlinsemier, wait on 8.1 for a while till they work out some bugs.

Regards,