This is an old revision of the document!

Using Palo Alto User-ID and App-ID in Netflow analytics

Palo Alto firewalls are capable of exporting two very useful pieces for information in its Netflow export. The User-ID¹⁾ and App-ID ²⁾ fields are added per-flow

User-ID : harvested from a number of mechanisms to map IP-Addresses to user names. The primary method is to interface with Microsoft Exchange / AD servers.
App-ID : the firewall deploys some heuristics to identify exact traffic types (eg Facebook, Google, Whatsapp)

These two fields really turbo charge your visibility and investigation capabilities. This article explains how to leverage these in Trisul Network Analytics.

monitoring overall traffic of Users and Apps
searching individual flows for a particular User or App at flow level
aggregate statistics of a particular User or App.

Monitor overall traffic

New Counter Groups : User-ID and App-ID

Trisul automatically creates two counter groups called User-ID and App-ID. These meter the following metrics at the global level.

meter	description
Total traffic	Total traffic bandwidth used by a User or App
Download traffic	Download bandwidth used by per User/App. The Download direction is metered when the flow source IP is an external IP address and the destination-IP is internal. Internal IPs belong to the Home Network configured in Trisul
Upload traffic	per-User bandwidth out of home network to external
Internal traffic	per-User bandwidth where both the source and destination are inside the home network
Transit traffic	where both source and destination are outside the home network. You will typically not find data here in normal enterprise environments
Flows	Total number of flows active per user/app

To view these metrics

Use Retro Analysis : Select Retro > Retro Counters then select a time frame, then select User-ID from the list of counters shown on the right side. You can see the top items for each metric.
Create dashboards : Customize > UI >Dashboards > Create a new dashboard. Give it a name. Then Press the + button to add a new module. Clone “Current Top Hosts” of type “current toppers in a list”. Then edit to module to change to User-ID and Metric 0.

The retro analysis screen looks like below.