IPSec Tunnel Monitoring for Single Tunnel

[KGDrake]

Is there any benefit of setting up tunnel monitoring if it’s just one tunnel, i.e. no failover tunnel?

Our monitor profile obviously would be to wait for recovery. We have third party alerts for devices on each side of the tunnel should they go down.

Any good reason to enable Palo’s tunnel monitor in this case? 

Wanted to see if there's something I am not understanding before I totally dismiss the monitoring aspect. 

[aleksandar.astardzhiev · Accepted solution]

Hi @KGDrake ,

In my humble opinion in your case there will be no benefit of enabling tunnel monitor.

Probably the only benefit would be to receive an alarm for issues with VPN tunnel in the rare edge cases where tunnel is UP (there is phase1 and 2, but for some reason traffic is not passing through.

If your third party monitoring is only monitoring the state of the IPsec phases, they could report tunnel up, but traffic to actually failing to pass the tunnel. With tunnel monitor enabled with wait recovery, you will have system log generated when the path is down or up.

Other than that, I also don't cannot think of any benefit of enabling it.

[KGDrake]

Thanks, and that's what I was thinking as well. Maybe having a tunnel down notification would come in quicker than the outside SNMP monitors and we could have a slight jump start on troubleshooting. Not sure if that's worth adding the extra monitoring config. 

[BPry]

@KGDrake,

There's not much to setting up the monitoring from a configuration standpoint really. You can monitor any IP you want, so it doesn't have to necessarily be the actual tunnel IP if you have a device that will always be on (a lot of times I'd use a switch IP).