Policy Analyzer
Learn about the Policy Analyzer feature.
| Where Can I Use This? | What Do I Need? |
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Updates to your Security policy are often time-sensitive and require you to act
quickly. However, you want to ensure that any update you make to your Security policy
meets your requirements and does not introduce errors or misconfigurations (such as
changes that result in duplicate or conflicting rules).
The Policy Analyzer feature in
Strata Cloud Manager enables you to optimize time and resources when
implementing a change request. Policy Analyzer not only analyzes and provides
suggestions for possible consolidation or removal of specific rules to meet your intent
but also checks for anomalies, such as Shadows, Redundancies, Generalizations,
Correlations, and Consolidations in your rulebase.
Use Policy Analyzer to add or optimize your Security policy:
Before adding a new Security policy—Check to see if new rules need to be added. Policy
Analyzer recommends how best to change your existing Security policy to meet
your requirements without adding another rule, if possible.
Streamline and optimize your existing Security policy rules—See where you can update your
rules to minimize bloat and eliminate conflicts and also to ensure that traffic
enforcement aligns with the intent of your Security policy.
Analyze your Security policy rules both before and after you
commit your changes.
Pre-Change Policy Analysis—Enables you to evaluate the impact of a new rule and analyze
the intent of the new rules against the rules that already exist to recommend
how to best meet the intent.
Post-Change Policy Analysis—Enables you to clean the existing rulebase by identifying
Shadows, Redundancies, and other anomalies that have accumulated over time.
Policy Analyzer supports both Strata Cloud Manager and Panorama managed deployments.
Policy Analyzer for Panorama managed deployments requires the following:
CloudConnector Plugin 1.1.0 or
later on your Panorama appliance. You need to enable this plugin using the
command:
> request plugins cloudconnector enable basic
We recommend you to install the latest version of the CloudConnector
plugin.
Panorama needs to be updated to PAN-OS version 10.2.3 or a later version.
Types of Anomalies That Policy Analyzer Detects
Policy Analyzer detects the following types of anomalies across your
Security policy:
Shadows—Rules that are not hit because a rule higher in the rulebase covers
the same traffic.
Security policy rules are evaluated in the rulebase from the top down so
shadows are created when a rule higher in the rulebase matches the same
traffic that a rule lower in order matches and the rules are configured with
a different action. If you remove the rule lower in order, the Security
policy does not change.
Redundancies—Two or more rules that match the same traffic and are configured
with the same action.
Generalizations—When a rule lower in the rulebase matches the traffic of a
rule higher in the rulebase, but not the other way around, and the rules
take a different action. If the order of the two policy rules is reversed,
the Security policy is impacted.
Correlations—Rules that correlate with another rule when one rule matches
some packets of the other rule but results in a different action. If the
order of the two rules is reversed, the Security policy is impacted.
Consolidations—Rules that you can consolidate into a single rule because the
action is the same and only one attribute is different. You can merge the
rules into a single rule by modifying the attributes of one of the rules and
deleting the others.
