The firewall can collect data that increases
visibility into network activity for Palo Alto Networks apps and
services, like Cortex XDR. These enhanced application logs are designed
strictly for Palo Alto Networks apps and services to consume and
process; you cannot view enhanced application logs on the firewall
or Panorama. Only firewalls sending logs to
Cortex Data Lake can generate
enhanced application logs.
Examples of the types of data
that enhanced application logs gather includes records of DNS queries,
the HTTP header User Agent field that specifies the web browser
or tool used to access a URL, and information about DHCP automatic
IP address assignment. With DHCP information, for example,
Cortex XDR™ can alert
on unusual activity based on hostname instead of IP address. This
allows the security analyst using Cortex XDR to meaningfully assess
whether the user’s activity is within the scope of his or her role,
and if not, to more quickly take action to stop the activity.
To
benefit from the most comprehensive set of enhanced application
logs, you should enable
User-ID; deployments for the Windows-based
User-ID agent and the PAN-OS integrated User-ID agent both collect some
data that is not reflected in the firewall User-ID logs but that
is useful towards associating network activity with specific users.
To
start forwarding enhanced application logs to Cortex Data Lake,
turn on enhanced application logging globally, and then enable it
on a per-security rule basis (using a Log Forwarding profile). The
global setting is required and captures data for traffic that is
not session-based (ARP requests, for example). The per-security
policy rule setting is strongly recommended; the majority of enhanced
application logs are gathered from the session-based traffic that
your security policy rules enforce.