Pan-OS Dev Corner

[martpdelacruz]

Hi Everyone, 

I wanted to share my project that reduces MTTR for admins who actively use the CLI terminal. While studying Palo Alto Networks NGFWs at my college as a student, I noticed how much time I was spending manually running and parsing CLI commands and realizing how slow Panorama can be at times. I decided to build a "cockpit" to automate that friction. 

I built "Nodal", an open source stateless diagnostic workbench using the Pan-OS-Python SDK and the XML API. I developed it within my lab env. using my VM-Series NGFW, but it's designed with enterprise-scale potential. I'd love to hear what the community thinks about it before it goes live on my github. 

Here's a quick rundown: 

1. Stateless: It’s built for temporary troubleshooting. No persistence = better security posture.
2. Pinning: You can pin historical results. No more scrolling up to find that one metric from 10 minutes ago.
3. Markdown Export: One button to copy the whole output into JIRA/Slack formatted for Markdown.
4. Docker: Container ready. 

Thank you for your time. 

[willisthiel074en]

This is an impressive initiative, especially coming from a student perspective. You’ve identified a genuine pain point—the "cli-lag" and UI overhead in large-scale environments—and solved it with a modern, dev-ops-centric approach. The stateless nature and Markdown export feature are particularly sharp additions that align perfectly with real-world incident response workflows where documentation speed is just as critical as the fix itself.