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There is room for improvement in the graphical user interface (GUI), which is becoming outdated, especially the NAT section.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.

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. 

Our firewall uses IPS and other features. We have some firewall rules using the IPS feature. For the VPN users using the MFA authentication protocol, we are using the SAML protocol.

The application ID or App-ID feature is a good feature for us. We are also using IPS and content inspection features. The firewall can inspect the packages that are passing through my network.

It should have more connection with Threat Intelligence Cloud. They can also include features related to SecOps and automation API.

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

It is awesome in terms of stability.

In terms of scalability, it is complicated because you have to scale up. Its scalability could be better. It would be great if you could scale out by integrating another node, and you are good to go. 

Currently, you have to buy new hardware with more power in terms of CPU and memory. You cannot simply increase the nodes in a cluster. In the last five months, we had to acquire new hardware because we are facing some higher usage in the Palo Alto hardware. We have about 15,000 users.

They provide good support. I would rate them an eight out of ten. 

They can increase the SOA time. When dealing with your case, sometimes, they take time. In the queue, you need to pass through one analyst and then go to the next level, which takes some time.

It was quite straightforward. In terms of technology, it was okay. As our environment is quite complicated, we had to deal with several phases of the implementation because we don't have only one appliance installed. We have implemented four Palo Altos. That's why it took some time, but it was just because of the complexity of our environment, not because of the solution itself. The whole project took one year.

We did some POCs to understand this solution. We had a lot of discussions in terms of the best way to implement this solution in our environment. It took the effort that this kind of solution normally takes.

It is not a cheap solution.

I would advise studying and understanding the best factors for implementing Palo Alto Networks Panorama and creating a roadmap to use all the features because it is not a cheap solution. Understand the possible ways to implement Palo Alto Networks Panorama and create a roadmap that implements all the features.

Palo Alto is constantly improving its solutions. They have been doing a great job and putting a great effort into their products. I would rate Palo Alto Networks Panorama a nine out of ten. We are satisfied with the solution.

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.

My obligations consist of overseeing cyber threat intelligence, threat defense operation, digital forensic incident response, and data loss prevention. So in the context of endpoint solutions, my position pertains mainly to the DLP (data loss prevention) function.  

Cisco AMP (Advanced Malware Protection) plays a significant role in our perimeter strategy for protecting the infrastructure. I work primarily with making sure that we have indicators of compromise in Cisco AMP. I am not on the network engineering or network operations side of things. I am mainly a consumer of services from those particular groups.  

We use Snort rules (open source network intrusion detection system [NIDS]). We use Yara rules (Yet Another Recursive/Ridiculous Acronym, rules for malware identification). We have Palo Alto IPSs (Intrusion Prevention Systems).  

Our use cases are primarily perimeter-based for runtime malware defense.  

The most valuable features are the management features like the ACL (Access Control List) management. These give us the capacity to make effective use of the capabilities of the product.   

Pricing is always something that consumers hope will be addressed in their favor. I think that some method of allowing for more customization and open integration with other controls within the enterprise is something that we want to have. We want to be able to have more orchestration of disparate parts.  

I think the features that most of the features that I would like to see are currently being implemented. Behavioral heuristic analysis of connections, for example. That is something that I know is being done now.  

We have been using Networks Panorama for a couple of years now.  

The stability is good. If you consider the size of our organization and the number of users that can verge on being impressive.  

I have good impressions of the scalability of this solution. We have not really had any issue scaling the usage.  

The tech support is actually pretty good. In general, they address issues in a timely manner with reasonable responses.  

My team has not previously used any different solutions in this company, but I have definitely, in the past, used other solutions. It is really necessary for the evaluation of product capabilities.  

The installation was straightforward in a complex environment. That means that we could have had far more issues were the product not well-designed from an installation standpoint. We are a big organization. Deployment can be a matter of weeks or it could be a matter of months depending on what jurisdiction the installation happens to be in.  

We have various partners and consultants that we work with in addition to having expensive competencies in-house. We do not often have a reason to go beyond the network of expertise that we have established.  

My advice to anyone considering Networks Panorama is to thoroughly research the competitive landscape. Do your Gartner research. Make sure you develop a set of requirements — a feature matrix that you can use to compare your requirements with the functionality offered by the various solutions under consideration. There are a lot of solutions out there and the goal would be to pick the one that best fits your situation rather than just one that someone recommends.  

On a scale of one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product as an eight-of-ten considering the knowledge and insight I have into it now.