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VM-Series Deployment Guide

Attributes Monitored Using the Panorama Plugin on Azure

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Attributes Monitored Using the Panorama Plugin on Azure

Proactively monitor the Virtual Machines (VMs) deployed on the Microsoft® Azure® public cloud.

When using the Panorama plugin for Azure, Panorama gathers the following set of metadata elements or attributes on the virtual machines in your Microsoft® Azure® deployment. Panorama can retrieve a total of 32 tags for each VM, 11 predefined tags, and up to 21 user-defined tags.

The maximum length of a tag can be 127 characters. If a tag is longer than 127 characters, Panorama does not retrieve the tag and register it on the firewalls. Also the tags should not include non-ASCII special characters such as { or ".

Up to a maximum of 21 user defined tags are supported. The user-defined tags are sorted alphabetically, and the first 21 tags are available for use on Panorama and the firewalls.

Panorama plugin on Azure version 3.0 or later supports following tags:

Load Balancer
Load balancer tags for each application gateway and standard load balancer (both public and private IP addresses). Each load balancer has predefined tags for resource group, load balancer name and region, and supports up to 21 user-defined tags specific to load balancing.
Subnet/VNET
Subnet/VNET tags for each Subnet and VNET in your subscription. Each subnet and VNET tag is associated with the full IP CIDR range so you can create policies based on a CIDR range rather than individual IP addresses. The plugin queries every subnet and VNET in your subscription and creates tags for them.

The following attributes are monitored in all Panorama plugin for Azure versions:

Attributes Monitored on the Azure VPC	Example
VM Name	azure.vm-name
OS Type	azure.os-type
OS Publisher	azure.os-publisher
OS Offer	azure.os-offer
OS SKU	azure.os-sku.
Azure Region	azure.region
Resource Group Name	azure.resource-group
Network Security Group Name	azure.nsg-name
Subscription ID	azure.sub-id
Load Balancer	azure.slb
App Gateway	azure.appgw
Virtual Network Name	azure.vnet-name
Subnet Name	azure.subnet-name
Service Tag	azure.svg-tag
User Defined Tags	azure.tag.key.value

Service Tag Monitoring

Panorama plugin on Azure version 3.0 supports service tags. For example, azure.svg-tag.

Azure Service tags simplify security for Azure virtual machines and Azure virtual networks because you can restrict network access to just the Azure services you want to use. A service tag represents a group of IP address prefixes for a particular Azure service. For example, a tag can represent all storage IP addresses.

The plugin makes a daily API call (at 5:00 am UTC) to retrieve all service tags from the Azure Portal, parses the payload to form IP-Service Mappings, and stores the mappings in the plugin database. The mappings are passed to configd, then on to Panorama. If the API call fails to return service information, the plugin forms the IP-Service mappings from the contents of service_tags_public.json. Plugin logs report the origin of the IP-Service mappings, the daily retrieval or the JSON file.

The plugin also updates service tags for a new installation of the plugin, commit events, and monitoring definition addition or deletion.

A sample IP-Service mapping is shown below:

Service Name: AppServiceManagementazure.svc-tag.<service-name>
Example:
    azure.svc-tag.AppServiceManagement.WestUS2
Public IP CIDRs:
    13.166.40.0/26
    54.179.89.0/18

Set Up the Azure Plugin for Monitoring on Panorama

Set up Active/Passive HA on Azure