Set Up the AWS Plugin for VM Monitoring on Panorama

Table of Contents

IAM Permissions Required for Monitoring the AWS VPC

Performance Tuning for the VM-Series Firewall on AWS

Set Up the AWS Plugin for VM Monitoring on Panorama

Get started with installing the AWS plugin and configure it for monitoring your EC2 instances on the AWS public cloud.

Where Can I Use This?	What Do I Need?
AWS	AWS account Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID VM-Series License (PAYG or BYOL) VM-Series plugin Panorama Panorama plugin for AWS

To find all the virtual machine workloads that your organization has deployed in the AWS public cloud, you need to install the AWS plugin on Panorama and configure Monitoring Definitions that enable Panorama to authenticate to your AWS VPCs and retrieve VM information on the workloads. Panorama retrieves the IP address of the VMs that are running—public IP address, and primary and secondary private IP addresses—and the associated tags. For a list of the metadata elements that Panorama supports, see List of Attributes Monitored on the AWS VPC.

After Panorama fetches the attributes, to push the virtual machine information from Panorama to the firewalls, you must add the firewalls (hardware or VM-Series) as managed devices on Panorama, and group the firewalls into one or more Device Groups. You can then specify which device groups are part of the Notify Group, which is a configuration element in a Monitoring Definition, that Panorama uses to register the IP address-to-tag mapping it retrieves from AWS.

Finally, to consistently enforce Security policies across the EC2 instances, you must set up Dynamic Address Groups and reference them in policy rules that allow or deny traffic to the IP addresses of the VMs. For streamlining your configuration and managing policies and objects centrally from Panorama, you can define the Dynamic Address Groups and Security policy rules on Panorama and push them to the firewalls instead of managing the Dynamic Address Groups and Security policy rules locally on each firewall.

The AWS plugin version 3.0.1 or later is for monitoring EC2 instances for up to 1000 VPCs on the AWS public cloud, AWS GovCloud, and AWS China. However, because Panorama can’t be deployed on AWS China, the IAM role does not support instance profiles on AWS China; you must provide the AWS credentials.

While configuring the monitoring definition, ensure that you attach the parent device group to the plugin notify-group and that all children DGs are unattached from the notify group.

To ensure that the DAU propagates all IP tags from parent device group to children DGs that are connected to the firewall, run the command debug dau settings device group recursive yes on Panorama CLI.

Planning Checklist for VM Monitoring on AWS

For Panorama to interact with the AWS APIs and collect information on your EC2 instances, you need to create an IAM role and assign the policies that grant the permissions required to authenticate to AWS and access the EC2 instances within your VPC. You can add 100 IAM roles to manage up to 1000 VPCs on Panorama.

Gather the VPC ID.
Tag your EC2 instances on AWS. You can tag (define a name-value pair) the EC2 instances either on the EC2 Dashboard on the AWS management console or using the AWS API or AWS CLI. See List of Attributes Monitored on the AWS VPC for the list of supported attributes.
Check for duplicate IP addresses across the VPCs for which you will enable monitoring. If you have duplicate IP addresses across AWS VPCs, the metadata will be appended together or swapped and this may cause unexpected results in policy enforcement.

Duplicate IP addresses are written to the plugin_aws_ret.log file that you can access from the CLI on Panorama.

Review the requirements for Panorama and the managed firewalls:

Minimum system requirements—Panorama virtual appliance or hardware-based Panorama appliance.

Panorama Minimum Requirements
System Resources	Memory	CPUs	Number of Monitored VPCs	Number of Tags Registered
	16GB	4	1-100	Panorama 9.1 or later with AWS plugin v 2.0 (or later) is tested to retrieve 10,000 IP addresses with 13 tags for each, or 5000 IP addresses with 25 tags for each, and successfully register them to the firewalls included within a device group. The tag length—includes name and value—for each EC2 instance is assumed to be 64 bytes per tag. For example, the EC2 instance name tag is aws.ec2.tag.Name.prod-web-app-4523-lvss6j.
	32 GB	8	100-500
	64 GB	16	500-1000
Panorama OS version	10.0.5 or later
AWS plugin version	3.0.1 or later
Licenses	Active support license and a device management license on Panorama for managing the firewalls. Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls must also have a valid support license.
Roles and Permissions to retrieve metadata on the EC2 instances	See IAM Roles and Permissions for Panorama

You must add the firewalls as managed devices on Panorama and create Device Groups so that you can configure Panorama to notify these groups with the VM information it retrieves. Device groups can include VM-Series firewalls or virtual systems on the hardware firewalls.
If your Panorama appliances are in a high availability configuration, you must manually install the same version of the AWS plugin on both Panorama peers. Additionally, if you're using instance profiles, you must attach the same instance profile to both Panorama peers.

You configure the AWS plugin on the active Panorama peer only. On commit, the configuration is synced to the passive Panorama peer. Only the active Panorama peer polls the AWS accounts you have configured for VM Monitoring.
Set up the credentials/permissions that Panorama requires to digitally sign API calls to the AWS services.
You can choose whether you want to provide the long-term credentials—Access Key ID and Secret Access Key—that enable access to the resources within each AWS account, or set up an Assume Role on AWS to allow access to defined AWS resources within the same AWS account or cross-accounts. With an Assume Role, you must set up a trust relationship and define the permissions while creating the role itself. This is useful in a cross-account deployment where the querying account does not have permissions to see or handle data from the queried account. For the Panorama plugin to successfully authenticate to the VPC and retrieve the tags, you must configure the Assume Role to use the AWS Security Token Service (STS) API to any AWS service. And a user from the querying account must have STS permissions to query the Assume Role and obtain the temporary security credentials to access resources. If your Panorama is deployed on AWS, you can opt to use an instance profile instead of providing the AWS credentials for the IAM role. The instance profile includes the role information and associated credentials that Panorama needs to digitally sign API calls to the AWS services. See IAM Roles and Permissions for Panorama for more details.

IAM Roles and Permissions for Panorama

Review the permissions required to enable Panorama to authenticate and retrieve metadata on the EC2 instances deployed within your AWS accounts.

With the AWS plugin, you can use IAM roles or instance profiles to enable Panorama to authenticate and retrieve metadata on the resources deployed within your AWS accounts.

When your Panorama is not deployed on AWS, you have two options. You can either provide the long-term IAM credentials for the AWS accounts you want to monitor, or set up an Assume Role on AWS to allow access to defined AWS resources within the same AWS account or cross-accounts. An Assume Role is recommended as the more secure option.
When your Panorama is deployed on AWS, in addition to the two options listed above, you can also add an instance profile that allows the IAM role to be passed to the EC2 instance. You can use an instance profile where all your monitored resources and Panorama are hosted within the same account, or an instance profile with Assume Role for cross account access where your Panorama and monitored resources are deployed across different AWS accounts. If you use the instance profile, you don’t enter your AWS credentials on Panorama.

Option 1: IAM role with long term credentials
Roles and Permissions Required	The AWS credentials associated with the AWS account that has the VPC/EC2 instances you want to monitor. The JSON format for the minimum permissions associated with the IAM role with long-term credentials is as follows: { “Version”: “2012-10-17", “Statement”: [ { “Sid”: “VisualEditor0”, “Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [ “elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancerAttributes”, “elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers”, “elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags”, “ec2:DescribeInstances”, “ec2:DescribeNetworkInterfaces”, “ec2:DescribeVpcs”, “ec2:DescribeVpcEndpoints”, “ec2:DescribeSubnets” ], “Resource”: “*” } ] }
Inputs on Panorama	Enter the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key for the user in PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupIAM Role.
Option 2: IAM role with Assume Role
Roles and Permissions Required	While you can use this option to monitor VPCs within the same or cross account, this option is recommended to enable cross account access by assuming a role that allows you to access resources to which you may normally have access. To assume a role from a different account, your AWS account must be trusted by that role and defined as a trusted entity in its trust policy. In addition, a user who wants to access a role in a different account must have a policy with secure token service (STS) access that specifies the role ARN. On Account 1 that you want to monitor: Create an IAM role with required permissions. For VM Monitoring you need the following permissions. { “Version”: “2012-10-17", “Statement”: [ { “Sid”: “VisualEditor0”, “Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [ “elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancerAttributes”, “elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers”, “elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags”, “ec2:DescribeInstances”, “ec2:DescribeNetworkInterfaces”, “ec2:DescribeVpcs”, “ec2:DescribeVpcEndpoints”, “ec2:DescribeSubnets” ], “Resource”: “” } ] } Copy the Role ARN. Create a user and add the Account ID for Account 2 as a trusted entity. This allows Account 2 the permissions to use this role to access the resources within your Account 1. On Account 2 that requires access to account 1* Attach the following policy with STS permissions and modify the Role ARN to match what you created on Account 1. { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": { "Effect": “Allow", "Action": "sts:AssumeRole", "Resource":"arn:aws:iam::012347211234:role/ PAN-OS-assume-role" } }
Inputs on Panorama	Enter the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key for the user on Account 2 on PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupIAM Role. Enter the Role ARN for the AWS Account 1, which you want to monitor in the PanoramaPluginsAWSMonitoring Definitions.
Option 3: Instance profile
Roles and Permissions Required	Only when Panorama is deployed as an EC2 instance on AWS When you use the AWS Management console to create an IAM role, the console automatically creates an instance profile with the same name as the role. Because the role and the instance profile have the same name, when you launch tour Panorama (EC2 instance) with an IAM role, the instance profile of the same name is associated with it. When Panorama and the resources you want to monitor are all in a single AWS account. Create an IAM role with AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess.
Inputs on Panorama	Select Instance Profile as the option in PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupIAM Role.
Option 4: Instance profile with Assume Role
Roles and Permissions Required	Use instance profile with Assume role when Panorama and the resources you want to monitor are deployed across AWS accounts. For Panorama HA, make sure to attach the same instance profile to both Panorama peers. On Account 1, where your EC2 instances are deployed: Create an IAM role. To this role, add the AWS Account ID (Account 2) where your Panorama is deployed as a trusted entity. Attach the JSON policies as detailed above for VM Monitoring. Copy the Role ARN. This role is required for Panorama to retrieve metadata on your EC2 instances or EKS clusters. On Account 2, where your Panorama is deployed: Create an IAM role and attach the JSON policy (with the STS policy and resource ARN you got from Account 1). For each additional AWS account you want to monitor, copy the same STS policy and modify the Role ARN.
Inputs on Panorama	Select Instance Profile as the option in PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupIAM Role Enter the Role ARN for the AWS account, which you want to monitor in the PanoramaPluginsAWSMonitoring Definitions. For example Account 1 in this example.

Install or Upgrade the AWS Plugin

To get started with monitoring your EC2 instances on AWS, refer to the Compatibility Matrix for the Panorama Plugin for AWS and VM-Series plugin versions required to support VM monitoring.

To upgrade an earlier Panorama plugin for AWS version to a later version (for example, going from version 1.0 to version 4.0), you must first upgrade to the Panorama and VM-Series plugin versions required for the latest version (currently, 4.0), then install as directed below to perform an upgrade.

After you install the latest AWS plugin (for example, v4.0) you can’t downgrade to an earlier version (for example, v2.0).

If you have a Panorama HA configuration, repeat the installation or upgrade process on each Panorama peer.

Install or uninstall plugins during a planned maintenance window.

If you currently have a Panorama plugin for any cloud platform installed, installing (or uninstalling) an additional plugin requires a Panorama reboot so commit changes.

If you have a standalone Panorama or two Panorama appliances installed in an HA pair with multiple plugins installed, plugins might not receive updated IP-tag information if one or more of the plugins is not configured. This occurs because Panorama won’t forward IP-tag information to unconfigured plugins. Additionally, this issue can occur if one or more of the Panorama plugins isn’t in the Registered or Success state (positive state differs on each plugin). Ensure that your plugins are in the positive state before continuing or executing the commands described below.

If you encounter this issue, there are two workarounds:

Uninstall the unconfigured plugin or plugins. It's recommended that you do not install a plugin that you do not plan to configure right away
You can use the following commands to work around this issue. Execute the following command for each unconfigured plugin on each Panorama instance to prevent Panorama from waiting to send updates. If you do not, your firewalls may lose some IP-tag information.
request plugins dau plugin-name <plugin-name> unblock-device-push yes
You can cancel this command by executing:
request plugins dau plugin-name <plugin-name> unblock-device-push no

The commands described are not persistent across reboots and must be used again for any subsequent reboots. For Panorama in HA pair, the commands must be executed on each Panorama.

Log in to the Panorama web interface, select PanoramaPlugins and click Check Now to get the AWS plugin version that supports VM monitoring.
Download and Install the plugin.

After you successfully install, Panorama refreshes and the AWS plugin displays on the PanoramaPlugins tab.

On the Panorama Dashboard General Information widget you can verify the Panorama plugin for AWS version that is installed.
(Panorama in HA) CommitCommit to Panorama.

If your Panorama is in HA, commit the changes to the Panorama configuration to ensure that tags are registered to the Panorama peer on failover.

Configure the AWS Plugin for VM Monitoring

Retrieve VM information for your AWS workloads, use the match criteria filters to define Dynamic Address Groups and enforce Security policy.

To begin monitoring the virtual machines in your AWS public cloud deployment, after you Install the AWS Plugin you must create a Monitoring Definition. This definition specifies the IAM Role that is authorized to access the EC2 instances within the AWS VPC you want to monitor and the Notify Group that includes the firewalls to which Panorama should push all the IP-address-to-tag mappings it retrieves. To enforce this policy, you must then create Dynamic Address Groups and reference them in Security policy. The Dynamic Address Groups enable you to filter the tags you want to match on, so that the firewall can get the public and private IP addresses registered against each tag, and then allow or deny access to traffic to and from the workloads based on the policy rules you define.

Log in to the Panorama web interface.
Set up the following objects for enabling VM Monitoring on AWS.
- Verify that monitoring is enabled on the plugin. This setting must be enabled for Panorama to communicate with the AWS public cloud for VM Monitoring.
  The check box for Enable Monitoring is on PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupGeneral.
- Add a notify group.
  1. Select PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupNotify GroupsAdd.
  2. Enter a Name to identify the group of firewalls to which Panorama pushes the VM information it retrieves.
  3. Select the Device Groups, which are a group of firewalls or virtual systems, to which Panorama will push the VM information (IP address-to-tag mapping) it retrieves from your AWS VPCs. The firewalls use the update to determine the most current list of members that constitute Dynamic Address Groups referenced in policy. If you're using the Panorama plugin for Azure and AWS, you can target the same firewall or virtual system with tags from both environments.
    
    Think through your Device Groups carefully.
    Because a Monitoring Definition can include only one notify group, make sure to select all the relevant Device Groups within your notify group. If you want to unregister the tags that Panorama has pushed to a firewall included in a notify group, you must delete the Monitoring Definition.
    To register tags to all virtual systems on a firewall enabled for multiple virtual systems, you must add each virtual system to a separate device group on Panorama and assign the device groups to the notify group. If you assign all the virtual systems to one device group, Panorama will register tags to only one virtual system on the firewall.
  4. Select the tags that you want to retrieve from the AWS VPCs.
    You can Select All 32 Tags (the default) or pick the Custom Tags you want to retrieve for your instances. With the Custom Tags option, you can Add the predefined tags and the user-defined tags that you want to use as match criteria in the Security policy. If you are monitoring a large number of EC2 instances, reducing the number of tags you retrieve ensures more efficient use of the CPU and memory capacity on your Panorama. Refer to Planning Checklist for VM Monitoring on AWS for some guidelines.
- Add an IAM Role.
  An IAM role is an entity that allows you to delegate access so that Panorama can make service requests on your behalf to the AWS resources (virtual machines that are deployed as EC2 instances).
  1. Select PanoramaPluginsAWSSetupIAM RoleAdd.
  2. Enter a Name and optionally a Description to identify the IAM role.
  3. Select Account Type—Instance Profile or AWS Account Credentials. If your Panorama is deployed on AWS, you can choose to either attach an instance profile with the correct permissions to your Panorama or add the credentials associated with the IAM role on Panorama. If your Panorama is not deployed on AWS, you must enter the credentials for the IAM role locally on Panorama.
  4. (For AWS Account Credentials only) Enter the Secret Access Key and re-enter it to confirm, and click OK.
(For AWS GovCloud only), you must set the AWS region running the op-command. The following is an example to set the AWS region using the op-command:

request plugins aws set-aws-region region <aws-govcloud-region>
Create a Monitoring Definition for each VPC you want to monitor.
When you add a new Monitoring definition, it's enabled by default.
- Select PanoramaPluginsAWSMonitoring Definition General, to Add a new definition.
- Enter a Name and optionally a Description to identify the AWS VPC for which you use this definition.
- Select the IAM Role, Add the VPC ID from the VPC Dashboard on the AWS management console, and Notify Group.
- Select AWS Regions:
  - All—Select all AWS regions.
  - Select—Select specific AWS regions. Search AWS regions from the Member search bar or Add new regions.
- (Optional) Enter the Role ARN, if you have set up role chaining and IAM roles with temporary credentials that have permissions to use the AWS STS API to access AWS resources with the same account or cross-account. The Role ARN must belong to the VPC you want to monitor.
- Select a Notify Group, and Enable monitoring.
  
  (For AWS GovCloud only), configure the AWS region under monitoring definition using the CLI and commit the changes. Run the following command on CLI:
  set plugins aws monitoring-definition <vm-mon-name> aws-regions <aws-govcloud-region>
- On the VPC IDs tab, add the VPC IDs from the VPC dashboard on the AWS Management Console.
Commit the changes on Panorama.

Verify that the status for the Monitoring Definition displays as Success. If it fails, verify that you entered the AWS VPC ID accurately and provided the correct keys and IDs for authorizing access.

Click Validate to verify that Panorama can authenticate using the IAM role and keys and to communicate with the AWS VPCs you’ve entered above.
Verify that you can view the VM information on Panorama, and define the match criteria for Dynamic Address Groups.
On HA failover, the newly active Panorama attempts to reconnect to the AWS cloud and retrieve tags for all monitoring definitions. If Panorama is unable to reconnect with even one of the monitoring definitions that you have configured and enabled, Panorama generates a system log message
Unable to process accounts after HA switch-over; user-intervention required.
If this happens, you must log into Panorama and verify the monitoring definitions to fix invalid credentials or remove invalid accounts. Although Panorama is disconnected from the AWS cloud, all tags that were retrieved for the monitoring definitions before the failover are retained and the firewalls can continue to enforce policy on that list of IP addresses. Panorama removes all tags associated with the accounts only when you delete a monitoring definition. As a best practice, to monitor this issue, you can configure action-oriented log forwarding to an HTTPS destination from Panorama so that you can take action immediately.
Know where to find the logs related to the AWS plugin on Panorama for troubleshooting.
- Use the CLI command less plugins-log to view a list of all available logs
  less plugins-log plugin_aws_ret.log displays logs related to IP address and tag retrieval.
  less plugins-log plugin_aws_proc.log displays logs related to processing of the registered IP address and tags.
  less plugins-log plugin_aws.log displays logs related to the AWS plugin configuration and daemons.
Use show plugins aws vm-mon-status for the status of the Monitoring Definitions.
```
admin@Panorama> show plugins aws vm-mon-status
Mon-Def Name      VPC           Status  Last Updated Time          Error Msg
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
MD-Ins-Prof-ARN  vpc-07986b091  Success 2019-12-02T10:24:56.007000
MD-gov           vpc-7ea1cf1a   Success 2019-12-02T10:24:56.008000
MD-IAM-ARN       vpc-025a83c123 Success 2019-12-02T10:24:56.012000
```