Use External Services for Monitoring
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Use External Services for Monitoring

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Use External Services for Monitoring

Using an external service to monitor the firewall enables you to receive alerts for important events, archive monitored information on systems with dedicated long-term storage, and integrate with third-party security monitoring tools. The following are some common scenarios for using external services:
  • For immediate notification about important system events or threats, you can Monitor Statistics Using SNMP, Forward Traps to an SNMP Manager, or Configure Email Alerts.
  • To send an HTTP-based API request directly to any third-party service that exposes an API to automate a workflow or an action. You can, for example, forward logs that match a defined criteria to create an incidence ticket on ServiceNow instead of relying on an external system to convert syslog messages or SNMP traps to an HTTP request. You can modify the URL, HTTP header, parameters, and the payload in the HTTP request to trigger an action based on the attributes in a firewall log. See Forward Logs to an HTTP(S) Destination.
  • For long-term log storage and centralized firewall monitoring, you can Configure Syslog Monitoring to send log data to a syslog server. This enables integration with third-party security monitoring tools such as Splunk or ArcSight.
  • For monitoring statistics on the IP traffic that traverses firewall interfaces, you can Configure NetFlow Exports to view the statistics in a NetFlow collector.
You can Configure Log Forwarding from the firewalls directly to external services or from the firewalls to Panorama and then configure Panorama to forwardlogs to the servers. Refer to Log Forwarding Options for the factors to consider when deciding where to forward logs.
You can’t aggregate NetFlow records on Panorama; you must send them directly from the firewalls to a NetFlow collector.