Palo Alto Networks Panorama Reviews

I primarily use Palo Alto Networks Panorama for the global administration of firewalls and managing the GlobalProtect services. It is used for logging and standard firewall activity, and opening firewall rules. Additionally, it centralizes various tasks on the platform.

The main value of Palo Alto Networks Panorama lies in its ability to centralize management, similar to FortiManager. It provides a single dashboard for all firewalls, allowing centralized control over different feeder systems based on Palo Alto. It's a comprehensive solution for managing firewalls globally.

There is room for improvement in the graphical user interface (GUI), which is becoming outdated, especially the NAT section. However, it still meets expectations and works well for our needs.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks Panorama for three years.

Stability is rated highly at nine out of ten.

Scalability depends on whether it's a hardware or virtual machine model, and I rate it at eight out of ten.

I rate technical support at seven out of ten. It depends on the case, with room for improvement in both quality and response time.

Neutral

In comparison, I prefer Panorama over FortiManager because Panorama includes all the modules needed for troubleshooting, unlike FortiAnalyzer. From an operational perspective, Panorama is better.

The initial setup for Panorama is simple.

Overall, I rate Panorama an eight out of ten and would recommend it to other users.

Our customers are using the product.

The solution offers good logging features. 

The management is great. 

It is easy to set up.

The solution is stable.

I can scale well. 

Using a Palo Alto solution is very straightforward. 

We have faced some challenges with the solution. We had Panorama in the cloud, and then we used Panorama to manage the on-prem firewalls. Then we had some network-centric architecture to connect to on-prem, where we had two separate Palo Alto firewalls on the cloud. From there, we had a direct connect, external direct connect to the on-prem. In that case, the issue we faced was that whenever the traffic left AWS, it went with any one of the subnets, either from availabilities on one subnet or availabilities on two subnets. When we configured Panorama, it was actually behind a NAT device on two separate IP signals, and there were challenges around that.

When we were deploying Panorama in AWS, there were some issues with Panorama deployment in AWS. I was the first customer to deploy Panorama in AWS, and I raised a case with both AWS and Panorama. Then, in the next Panorama release, they enhanced some features, and both came up in the same version. I had to wait for two or three months to get to a resolution. 

Sometimes technical support is slow to respond. 

The solution is expensive. 

Panorama can be a bit difficult compared to other Palo Alto solutions. It would be ideal if they could simplify it a bit. 

I've been using the solution for two years. 

Overall, the product is stable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We haven't had an issue with scalability.

We work mainly with enterprise-level organizations. 

In our region, technical support is not so good. We need to wait if we are reaching out with a P1 case. Sometimes we have to wait for two or three hours. That can be an issue.

I do also work with various other vendors. 

The initial setup is very simple and quite straightforward. It was not overly complex. It's been two years now since I implemented the solution, and therefore I cannot recall exactly how long the deployment took. While the process was smooth, we did face some integration issues, for example, integrating the active standard Palo Alto to Panorama.

It's a costly product. All Palo Alto products are pretty expensive. Nowadays, people are looking for security and something that offers easy management. Therefore, Palo Alto can easily charge what they want. 

We're partners. We handle pre-sales and implementation of the solution for clients. 

It's a good product. However, if a company wants to deploy the solution, it should first do a proper study and design it properly. Otherwise, they will likely run into issues. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We are a cybersecurity business, so we are a Palo Alto reseller and integrator. We also use Palo Alto to run our firewalls in our own environment. 

It's really the central management component that helps us. From a configuration point of view, when we are implementing it for large organizations where the customer owns a hundred firewalls, it's just easy to manage them all at one central location. I think that's probably one of the best features from a visibility component.

Price is probably one of the biggest things that we struggle with, specifically with Palo, and that's across their whole portfolio. Also, the tech support could be better.

I have been working with this solution for about five years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is easy to scale.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate the technical support as a four. 

Positive

The setup process is simple and straightforward. 

If I were to rate the pricing of Palo on a scale of one to five, with one being really high and five being a good, reasonable price, I would rate Palo as a three.

We generally compare Palo Alto with the offerings from Check Point because they both seem to have the majority of the market share here in my region.
From a stability point of view, I think Panorama is better. Check Point is struggling with their current software releases along those lines, and Panorama is very good at releasing new features along those lines. Palo is a lot faster than a lot of the competitors on the market.

I would rate Panorama as an eight out of ten.

We use it internally to manage the solutions that we provide to our customers. So, we use it to manage our own firewalls and Prisma Access. We also use it to manage managed firewalls. We can also resell it, but we don't tend to do too many panoramas.

We are using version 10.0.7, which is the latest one under version 10. We're not running 10.1 yet. We don't need to run that.

The entire ease of use is most valuable. If you're managing firewalls locally with PAN-OS, the look and feel of Panorama is the same. So, you don't have to relearn another product. If you're used to managing firewalls from Palo Alto, you can easily use Panorama to manage them. It looks and feels the same.

Our primary issue at the moment is to manage Prisma Access because we just switched over to using Prisma Access for our customers. My newest one is in North America. It is a great tool for that. The fact that you can push out your Prisma Access just dynamically and it changes into Prisma Access Cloud is fantastic.

It tends to move along fairly quickly in terms of features because it is a part of PAN-OS. We are waiting on one feature that's on the beta at the moment, but that's because we use Okta as our authentication.

Reporting might be an area to improve. It can provide reporting or some sort of graphical representation of your environment.

I have been using it for probably two years.

There are no reliability issues.

You can manage multiple environments, multiple firewalls, and multiple locations with it. So, it scales really well.

We have just a handful of admins. We have less than five of them.

I have not used their technical support.

We've always been Palo Alto. The founders of our company were ex-Palo Alto people, so it is always going to be Palo Alto.

I've been using it for two years, but I didn't actually deploy those instances at Panorama. When we recently moved to Azure, I actually deployed it in Azure, and I had no issues. So, I was a complete rookie in terms of deploying it because I'd never done it before. I did that with minimal assistance from Palo Alto or anybody. So, I would say it is easy to deploy in the cloud.

In terms of updates, PAN-OS releases come every month, six weeks, or so. You have to be running a higher or equal level of Panorama to the firewalls that you're managing. If you're keeping your firewall environments up to date, you also have to keep your Panorama up to date, and with that comes new features. You have to plan for firewall updates more than Panorama, which is just managing other environments. You can pretty much update Panorama whenever you want. There is no customer or firewall outage when you update Panorama. It is just the reboot time. You just download it, install it, and reboot it, and you're done. It takes less than 20 minutes.

We're a reseller, and we're an MSSP. So, we get some extreme discounts. 

It is easy if you're used to managing firewalls. Using Panorama to manage the firewalls is not rocket science. It is just another GUI or web UI.

Palo Alto is really good at innovation, adding new functions and features, and rolling those out on a regular basis. So, they're going in the right direction. As long as that keeps happening, they are good. They should just keep adding and improving. 

I would rate Palo Alto Networks Panorama a nine out of 10.

We primarily use it for firewall monitoring, reviews, and policy-level monitoring.

Threat prevention and traffic monitoring are the most valuable features for us. We use them the most.

There is room for improvement in response time for tech support.

I have been using this solution for three years. 

The stability is good, so I would rate it around nine.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

The customer service and support team is okay because the response time depends on the case. For example, it can take a lot of time if they don't have a readily available solution.

If compared with Cisco, I find Panorama is better and easier to use.

Our technical team did the setup for us.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Even though there was a dedicated team to monitor the logs with the SIEM platform, I would use the solution when there is a potential outbreak to provide a particular tool to view the effects of the outbreak on my environment.

It was a good functional tool. When we had multiple Palo Alto devices to be managed, it provided a lot of visibility onto those solutions. It was a good and useful tool.

The solution helped us consolidate and use logs.

The UI was fine. The visualization would be almost similar to Palo Alto Firewalls.

Overall, the functionality was very good.

It was a stable product.

It's easy to set up. 

I don't have any real comments in terms of areas of improvement. 

The scalability is limited. 

It is an expensive product. 

The last time I used the solution was six months ago. I recently switched jobs. I previously used the solution for about three or four years. 

The solution was stable and reliable. There were no bugs or glitches, and it didn't crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability of the solution nine out of ten. 

It's not hugely scalable. It has limited scalability. That said, it's good. It offers what is requested. It depends on your initial planning and pricing, so it's not great in scalability. However, I would give it an overall scalability rating of seven out of ten.

At my old company, we had six to eight people using the solution. 

I did raise some tickets with technical support, and I found them to be helpful and responsive. 

Positive

It was pretty easy to set up. I did not find the implementation complex. I'd rate the ease of deployment nine out of ten. 

The pricing of the product is high. They aren't very cost-effective. That said, they do provide high value to organizations. 

I've seen three other devices like FortiGate and FortiManager as well as FortiAnalyzer. However, I can't make apples-to-apples comparisons between the solutions. I can say that the interface of Panorama is better in general, and Panorama does offer very good visibility.

I was a customer and end-user. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Panorama in order to centrally manage our firewall.

Basically, in my firewalls, I usually create new signatures and deploy them for each endpoint firewall in each region. It's great for creating signatures and activating activities.

It's pretty user-friendly. The user interface is good. 

The product has been stable. 

It's not part of my role to connect other devices to Panorama, so I don't know how the integration works. I maybe need a better understanding of how the policies of the signature work. For example, what does it mean to exclude an IP, and what are the policy rules and priorities? I need more knowledge about the signature policy and priorities.

Instead of searching their knowledge base in their website, maybe they can interact with us in the user interface to explain things better. If they had pop-ups to help guide us, we might get fewer failures along the way. Small notifications would be quite helpful. 

I've been working with the solution for one year. 

It is very stable, from my experience, at least. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. I'd rate it an eight or nine out of ten in terms of stability.

I don't deal with scaling the solution. I am not sure what is possible. 

We have about five to ten users on the solution right now. 

I had some interactions with the technical support of Palo Alto.

They have been pretty good overall. We are mostly satisfied. 

Positive

We are using Aqua Sec. 

I did not handle the initial setup process. I can't speak to how it went. 

Our technical team manages the initial implementation process. 

In my experience in general, Palo Alto is very expensive.

We tested Palo Alto solution for Kubernetes, and the Aqua Sec and Aqua Sec was much cheaper than Palo Alto. If Palo Alto were less expensive like them, maybe we would've chosen them over Aqua Sec.

I've never compared the solution to other options. The company uses it and therefore I do too. 

We are working with version ten or somewhere around that. I am not sure of the exact version. 

I'm an end-user and I am non-technical. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

This is a solution that we implement for our customers.

It allows our customers to manage several firewalls from a central location. Some examples are securing the internet edge, data centers, micro-segmentation within the data centers, and securing their campuses.

The majority of the deployments are on-premises, however, we have more and more customers that are moving to the cloud. This solution is helping them to secure their cloud, as well.

Using this solution means that you can store logs for longer periods, up to perhaps two years, depending on your attached storage.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use that comes from the GUI. I have found that you can do almost everything from the GUI. You rarely have to log into the CLI, at perhaps once in six months or a year.

This solution offers a lot of advanced functionality that is easy to deploy and not available from other vendors. An example of this is credential theft. Credentials are sometimes collected through phishing emails or websites, and this solution helps to reduce that type of attack. Every five minutes, Palo Alto updates the list of phishing websites. You can set up a profile to ensure that if anybody tries to access such a website, whether it be Http or https, then the attempt will be blocked.

Palo Alto will automatically monitor the contents of POST messages and check to see if they contain credentials such as a username and password. If they do then it may indicate an attempt to steal credentials by an external site. The traffic will be blocked, the incident will be reported, and the admin will be notified.

This solution makes the lives of security admins very easy in cases, as an example, for configuring IPS. If you want to secure traffic between any two zones, we need to make sure that the applications are identified, the users are identified, and all of the security profiles are applied. These including antivirus, anti-spyware, and IPS. This solution makes the configuration very easy.

Each firewall is treated as a security sensor where the firewall talks to the cloud and a machine running artificial intelligence helps to detect malware or other threats. This is an important step in the protection that this solution offers.

The dual WAN functionality is missing in this solution.

This solution is very stable. It is a mature solution with a mature operating system. I have one firewall that has been running since 2010, and it is still upgrading to the latest software and still working.

This solution scales well.

We have many more than forty customers who are using this solution. One is a university with twenty thousand students, and we have deployments in large banks, different branches of government, etc. There are many thousands and thousands of users who are being secured.

The demand is very high and the standards are improving. Data centers are booming, and customers are looking for more enhancement in their platforms.

Technical support for this solution is awesome. However, I rarely open a case because their platform is very stable. Most of the cases are related to basic support, such as an RMA. I have seen other vendors like Fortinet or Cisco, where the enabling of a function means that you have to deal with support, and there are issues that come from that.

The initial setup of this solution is very easy. The length of time for deployment depends on how many policies you have, but the basic configuration should not take more than one hour.

For policy tuning, you need to review and tune the devices. Palo Alto has several tools to help with migration from the legacy approach of port-based policies to application-based policies.

Initially, Palo Alto looks expensive, but if you dig deeper then you will find that it is very comparable, or even cheaper than other solutions. For example, if you are looking for a one-gig next-generation firewall then you will start looking at the Palo Alto 850. If you compare the price of this to Fortinet, Worksense, Forcepoint, or Sophos, then you will see that they offer three or four gig performance at half the price. However, it is not true.

The reason for this is that not all of the security features are enabled. When you enable them, the performance degrades by more than ninety percent, and I have seen this happen in many different scenarios. This means that for the Palo Alto 1GB, it actually means 1GB with all of the functionality enabled. For the other vendors, you will never see their datasheet with all of the functionality enabled for a real environment with real traffic. It is based on lab traffic. Because the reality is that the performance of Palo Alto is better, it means that the price is better. When you compare models using real performance, and you do the calculation, you will see that Palo Alto is very comparable.

We have worked with many, many vendors, and this is the most mature next-generation firewall in the market. The performance of Palo Alto is very predictable, unlike other vendors who are faking their datasheet in terms of high-performance numbers that are unrelated to a real network, or real traffic.

Palo Alto provides numbers that reflect what is happening when all of the security functions are enabled, whereas other vendors do not show their performance will all of the functionality enabled. In reality, they are better than others. At the end of the day you are buying a security device, and you don't want to turn off any of the functionality to enhance your performance. Palo Alto is designed from day zero for performance and security.

This is the most mature next-generation firewall in the market and a solution that I strongly recommend.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is not to trust internet users. Whether it is regular users or employees, they do not like to be detected. They keep trying to work around the policies using different applications and peer-to-peer functionality. I have learned this because Palo Alto has full visibility to all types of traffic, and we're able to catch these scenarios and put security policies int place.

Palo Alto has done a lot towards closing gaps in security. Cloud security is not their only focus. It is concerned with the flows between VMs, storage, and containers. They are concerned with PCI requirements and compliance. They have also launched Cortex Analytics to help close gaps further. They are in a very good position to lead the future.

At the end of the day, everything is relative, and I would rate this solution a ten out of ten compared to other products. However, there is room for improvement.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.