Palo Alto Networks and Kentik

Networking and security professionals face a constant challenge in understanding, managing, and protecting IT and service infrastructures that are far flung, dynamic, and virtual. The problems only get greater as application complexity increases and cloud becomes a daily reality. Kentik® and Palo Alto Networks® work together to provide insightful telemetry and advanced, automated analytics for improving visibility, optimizing network efficiency and protective policy, and providing the operational and security intelligence needed to keep users, partners, and customers safe and productive.

Use Case #1: Extending Network and Application Visibility

Challenge

Establishing an end-to-end view of network and application traffic across geographically and topologically diverse infrastructures

Solution

Add IPFIX data from Palo Alto Networks firewalls into Kentik’s traffic monitoring and analytics. Locations that have a Palo Alto Networks firewall present can now contribute telemetry, helping network operations and application support teams to better understand which applications are active across the infrastructure and who is using them, from data center to branch to cloud.

Use Case #2: Traffic Pattern Recognition and Response

Challenge

Recognizing coordinated attack patterns across multiple locations

Solution

Use Kentik’s ability to provide centralized visibility for large and geographically broad deployments of Palo Alto Networks firewalls, so that common patterns of legitimate and illegitimate network traffic can be recognized, common sources identified, and actions taken to mitigate ongoing impact to network availability and proficiency.

Use Case #3: Firewall Policy Verification and Tuning

Challenge

Recognizing business intent and assessing policy impact across a global infrastructure

Solution

Analyze denied and accepted traffic flows. View traffic in Kentik by flow accept or deny status to reveal who is driving traffic that is getting denied, what the traffic is, in what volume, and from where.

Use Case #4: Integrating Forensic Analysis

Challenge

Understanding the full scope of activity of a particular application, user, or network node, when an operational incident or security threat dictates deeper investigative workflows.

Solution

Add flow data from Palo Alto Networks firewalls into the Kentik data store, for access to a full resolution historical store of activity to mine and explore.

Use Case #5: Network Capacity Planning

Challenge

Recognizing resource exhaustion at remote sites

Solution

Send flow data records to Kentik, to monitor maximum peak activity and growth trends in traffic traversing Palo Alto Networks firewalls, to ensure that sufficient capacity is available for continuous protection.