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Huge data transfers between remote DC and PAN Agent

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Huge data transfers between remote DC and PAN Agent

Not applicable

Hi Team,

We have had issue with huge data transfers between PAN agent and remote DC's

We have observed lot of data activity between the PAN Agent and other Domain Controller servers on the WAN.

For instance, in the last one hour our Router accounting, and WAN Graphs, has shown 830 Mb of file access from one of our
remote DC, which is connected via WAN MPLS to PAN agent at our HO.

Another of remote DC's over the WAN, for last 24 hours, shows 19 GB of data transfer !!

Could this mean some fine tuning has to be done on PAN agent or is this supposed to be normal.

What exactly is this huge ammount of data transfer, and why so many GB !!


Kindly advise at the earliest.

Rgds,

Tauseef

9 REPLIES 9

Not applicable

Hi,

I have tuned the timers for PAN agent, Please find attached.

Would this have any issue. Please advise.

Tauseef

Generally speaking you will want to have a Pan Agent at the site with your remote domain controller(s) to cut down on the amount of traffic over your WAN links.

The default timer for reading the security log is one second. In your example timer configuration you have set this interval to 600 seconds (10 minutes). This means that there will be up to a ten minute delay between a user logon and the firewall receiving an update that includes the user-to-ip-mapping for this logon event. This will obviously have some impact on your end-users as they may have to wait up to 10 minutes before they match the correct security policy based upon their user ID and group membership.

-Benjamin

L4 Transporter

ta185020 wrote:

Hi Team,

We have had issue with huge data transfers between PAN agent and remote DC's

We have observed lot of data activity between the PAN Agent and other Domain Controller servers on the WAN.

For instance, in the last one hour our Router accounting, and WAN Graphs, has shown 830 Mb of file access from one of our
remote DC, which is connected via WAN MPLS to PAN agent at our HO.

Another of remote DC's over the WAN, for last 24 hours, shows 19 GB of data transfer !!

Could this mean some fine tuning has to be done on PAN agent or is this supposed to be normal.

What exactly is this huge ammount of data transfer, and why so many GB !!


Kindly advise at the earliest.

Rgds,

Tauseef

Tauseef.

If you think about it, the PAN Agent reads *every* event in the security log - which means that if you're accessing a remote DC with your agent, you're going to get a lot of traffic in a busy network.

I believe best practise for this situation is to run at least one agent per SITE - so have one of the DC's at your remote site running an agent and reporting back to the PA firewall, rather than having an agent in your central site connecting to the DC at the remote site.

Careful configuration of the agent at the remote site (I.E. only have the agent for the site monitoring the DC's located in that site) would minimise traffic.

You can configure your firewall to listen for multiple agents - up to 5 per firewall, I believe - so having more than one running shouldn't be a real issue, unless you're worried about resources on your remote DC.

Cheers.

L3 Networker

We are seeing this as well -- in fact, over a three-week period we saw UIA-to-DC traffic volumes in the order of terabytes (!!!) on our network. Seems the busier the site, the bigger the traffic. So the approach we are taking is to put the agents as close to (or possibly even on) the DCs as possible.

In contrast, over the same three-week period the traffic between the agent and the firewall itself is only 130 MB. It's a good trade-off for having to run several agents. Each firewall should handle up to 100 UIAs and each UIA can handle 10 DCs, or a max 1,000 domain controllers per firewall.

Hope this helps.

The User ID Agent software is quite chatty.  In our environment the User ID Agent server has a consistent throughput of 2Mbps. To be fair, this server is also used for the Websense DC Agent server, but I'm pretty confident that the bulk of the traffic is from the PA side of things.

In our environment we have 6 different user ID agent servers and they are all collocated with the domain controllers.  Someone mentioned that the firewalls can only talk to five user agent servers.  We have six and the firewalls here see them just fine.  So, I can at least say that at least six will work.  

The issue I'm seeing with having multiple PAN-Agent is only one PAN-agent is primary all the others are just backup. Also pan-Agent from what I've seen only look at the first 2 DC listed on the list.

Please correct me if I have wrong impression.

thanks.

Our 6 Pan Agents are used for six different domains.  Each one is only configured to point to the two domain controllers at that location.  The PA collect user data from all of the User Agents so in our environment every one of them is a primary.

I should clarify our setup.  We only have one Pan Agent server for each domain.  It sounds like you have a several backup PAN agent servers for a single domain.

L6 Presenter

Here's method to reduce WAN usage between the UserID agent and remote DC's.  You can instruct the DC's to forward the logon events to a log collector & have the agent read the login events from the centralized log collector.  The DC's will transmit only logon events to the log collector & this will minimize WAN usage.

Information on how to set up a log collector -  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722010.aspx.

The DC's are configured as the log source and info can be found here -  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748890.aspx.

On the log collector, we need to change the Log Path of the Forwarded Events to point to file ...\Logs\Security.evtx and our UserID agent will read the events located there.

fwd-event.jpg


We also instruct the log collector to subscribe to these logon events.

2000 & 2003

AUTH_TICKET_GRANTED = 672,

      SERVICE_TICKET_GRANTED = 673,

      TICKET_GRANTED_RENEW = 674,

2008

LOGON_SUCCESS_W2008 = 4624,

AUTH_TICKET_GRANTED_W2008 = 4768,

      SERVICE_TICKET_GRANTED_W2008 = 4769,

  TICKET_GRANTED_RENEW_W2008 = 4770,

Great tip for those situations where one dont want to install the pan-agent straight on each DC (and lock it to only read the log from localhost).

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