Palo Alto Networks Panorama Reviews

The basic use case is when you have a lot of Palo Alto Networks firewalls. Panorama is a security management tool for all of your Palo Alto Network devices. Every time you create some configurations or when you need to manage a lot of branches with Palo Alto Network devices, and when you need to group these branches to use the policies, the configurations on a group of devices, it's useful. It's easier to use Panorama to manage stuff.

It's user-friendly. Users can easily manage the configurations, the policies, and the objects inside Panorama, inside the Palo Alto Network devices. 

It is really useful for big deployments. It's useful for users that have two devices. 

We have the ability to install Panorama in a public cloud deployment, and of course, Palo Alto also has their own cloud in which you can store the logs of all of your devices and basically get the reporting and get management for these logs through Panorama. Palo Alto has cloud firewalls and they are also manageable through Panorama. This is like a cherry on the top of all of your network security from Palo Alto in your organization.

The setup is easy.

It is not a cheap product. Some kinds of Palo Alto devices can cost a few thousands of dollars, and Panorama will be even higher. For the big customers that have a lot of devices, it is crucial to get all the benefits from the Palo Alto Networks portfolio regarding network security.

For a highly secure environment, they sometimes need only hardware appliances, not a virtual machine. 

Palo Alto Networks was the first vendor in my cybersecurity career. I started to work with Palo Alto Networks at my first job in a small integrator company in Ukraine. I've been working with Panorama for maybe 16 or 17 years. There was a small period of three years between this experience, and now I'm again working with Palo Alto Networks.

It's really stable. We have a public cloud and hardware and we have a virtual one, and all of them are really stable. We have not seen critical issues or a lot of comments from the customers that it is not a stable solution.

It's really scalable. It's based on the number of devices. If you need 25 devices, it will be one license. If you need thousands of devices to manage, it will be another kind of license. It's really scalable and can install the machines with the high availability mode, so it's really stable.

Support answers quickly. I have no issues with Palo Alto Network support. Basically, our company is an Accredited Support Center of the Palo Alto Networks for our customers and basically we are also providing support at the lowest levels. 

It's really straightforward to implement. It's not something where you need some special engineer. Palo Alto has a really great document portal, docs portal, where you can find all the needed information to deploy this. That said, it is really straightforward for any administrator who deployed something before. You just click next, next, next, you just then need to change a key, and that's all.

It's not the cheapest solution. It can be quite expensive. There are other less costly options available on the market.

I am working for an official distributor of Palo Alto Networks.

It is on-premises, and it has cloud abilities too. Public cloud deployments are available.

I can recommend the solution to new users and suggest, firstly, that they choose their mode of Panorama. They need to decide if they will deploy in a public cloud or maybe on-premises. If you have a lot of Palo Alto devices, you will need Panorama. If you have this significant amount of Palo Alto Network devices, when you get Panorama, you will get a lot of features that will make your life easier.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

My primary use of Panorama is as a management unit, including firewall and log management.

The most valuable feature is that the management unit is centralized, so you can manage different regions from one place.

An area for improvement would be the connectivity, which sometimes means logs can be slow to display.

Panorama's stability is very good.

This solution is scalable.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup isn't very complex, it's user-friendly. The deployment time depends on your capacity planning - how many firewalls will be managed and how many logs or discs you require.

When implementing, make sure someone involved has a good technical understanding of the product and how it will work. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

We are using the solution primarily for monitoring the firewalls that we have. We have multiple firewalls, including a DC firewall, a perimeter firewall, etc. We are using Panorama to control all of our firewalls.

Whenever we have an issue, we can just monitor the traffic. We can pinpoint problems and know from which firewall they are originating. We also have the ability to analyze the issue to see if it's coming from from the setup side or somewhere else. The solution makes it very easy to monitor traffic.

It's helpful that the solution allows us to control all the firewalls from one device. You can check and monitor all the devices also, from one website. It's also got easy troubleshooting capabilities.

The interface of Panorama is very user-friendly. It's easy to find and get information and create reports.

It can take a few minutes to test to see if any changes are successful or not. This needs to be improved. A change commit should take a second, not a minute or more.

Panorama does suffer from performance issues, which they need to resolve.

Also, technical support isn't very responsive and could use some improvement.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is pretty scalable.

Technical support is okay. I'd give it a 60% rating in terms of its effectiveness. Sometimes they are too slow to respond.

We previously used Cisco SPD. We switched because Cisco security is very complicated and is very difficult to establish.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not complex at all. Deployment was only two to three hours in total. For implementation, we only needed three people, including someone from Security and someone from the Network team.

We implemented the perimeter firewall with the help of Palo Alto. The DC firewall we did by ourselves.

Before choosing this solution, we also looked at Fortinet.

We are using the private cloud deployment model.

I would recommend the solution. It has a user-friendly interface. It's stable. You can easily troubleshoot any issue. You will also get clear information, and, in general, it's a very good product that allows you to manage more than one device from a central interface.

Of course, before you do any change, I would recommend that you back up everything first.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

The primary use case is the centralized management of our firewalls.

It provides a quicker response time to vulnerabilities and more visibility into traffic flows.

I think it increases staff productivity.

Its automatability: You need it to automate things. We have used it for URL blocking. For example, if there is a threat out there, and we needed to immediately block a new malicious URL across a global enterprise, this is pretty difficult. With Panorama, we can automate this easily with their API. 

My pain point is the automation process is not well-documented. There are some things that they could improve on there.

If you go in the system to search for something, it is not intuitive. They could really improve that.

There is a concept of device groups and a concept of templates. The templates can allow for inheritance, but the device groups do not.

It is fairly stable. We do pretty heavy bug testing. We have a rigorous code review process that we go through for each version. Therefore, stability is on the top of our list of things that we look at. So, I haven't ran into any issues where it's flaking out altogether. 

It's fairly scalable. We probably have 12 to 16 of them spread across the globe to help with regional redundancy, because we don't want our firewall talking to Panorama across a slow land link. So, we've split them out globally, but it seems pretty scalable.

The technical support is pretty good. We do have a resident engineer from Palo Alto who sits right next to me. 

The initial setup is easy, but I have done it like a thousand times before with a bunch of other products. The product is not much different than anything else.

We outsource a lot of our boots on the ground, which is actually a lot by design. With every company, when you have two different organizations working together, there is always a little bit of tension. They don't have the same reporting structure, but everything went out smoothly. 

Typically, I'll design the solution, then I'll have somebody else implement it. This is sort of how it works for everything.

With the URL filtering, we probably went down from around four hours in response time to about five minutes.

The licensing is not cheap. There are always hidden costs. You have support costs, or maybe you need to buy more optics on how the solution fits into the rest of your environment. It is possible some of the rest of your environment will need to change too.

I think we're getting AlgoSac, which is another firewall automation tool. However, I wasn't involved with the decision for that one so I'm not too sure on the specifics, but I know we are going with them.

If you are looking at getting a Palo Alto firewall, then you should probably at least look into Panorama. Because if you start out just putting in firewalls and you don't have this, you will be kicking yourself that you didn't have this from day one. 

If you have just one firewall out there, maybe you don't need it. However, if you have two or three, then you should probably get it to be in front of a lot of the features which you will want eventually.

It is pretty solid product. Our security program is fairly immature compared to other enterprises, and this product has definitely helped us lock down things.

We have a rigorous code review process. Therefore, we are always back a bunch of versions. If the latest version came out today with new features on it, we probably wouldn't get to that for quite a while.

There are only certain things that you can do within the Panorama solution.

Panorama is one centralized management server through which all our devices are protected. It's a security management tool.

One of the most valuable aspects for us is the fact that all of the policy management and configuration management is able to happen right from the centralized management. This makes everything much easier.

The initial setup is pretty simple.

The solution, especially the latest versions, is very stable.

The product can scale well.

The customer support needs to be better. Sometimes we need to wait for hours before getting someone from the product team or someone from the Palo Alto customer support to get on a call if we are facing some issue. They could reduce the wait times.

I've been using Palo Alto for about a year and a half.

The solution is quite stable. The more high-end devices you take, the more stability. If you're using a little old model of firewalls, then there are issues with regard to stability. In such cases, Palo Alto would likely recommend you upgrade to the latest hardware. The latest hardware is really very stable.

The solution is quite scalable. 

Technical support is quite slow. They are not quick to respond.

The initial setup is easy. It is not that complex. There are articles and documentation, readily available on the Palo Alto website, the Palo Alto Portal, which can help you figure out how to configure the device.

Our deployment strategy for any new customer is to directly implement it in a testing phase. In a testing phase, we try to see if all the requirements that the customer wants to see if we will be facing any challenges. We want to initially try and replicate that in a lab scenario. That way, if there are any issues, we can get back to the team at Palo Alto and ask them questions. If it works, then the customer goes into production.

We don't have any dedicated person for maintaining anything. The antivirus, everything, can be directly, automatically updated on the firewall. That is not an issue. On top of that, if a particular device is getting into trouble then we get the NMS alerts for that device. In such scenarios, once we have a device failure at a particular site, we can have that device replaced. We can open a case with the vendor and once we give them a particular serial number or the VM instance, we can initiate an RML to replace that device with a new device. It takes a couple of days for that to happen.

We have another team that handles licensing. In operations, we do not have any visibility with regard to cost.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities.

We use Palo Alto Networks Panorama to monitor and have centralized control.

The most valuable features of Palo Alto Networks Panorama are centralized management. We can manage all our firewalls.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama could improve by making the solution less expensive.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks Panorama for one year.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama is a stable solution.

I have found Palo Alto Networks Panorama to be scalable and it is easy.

We have two engineers that use the solution.

I have previously used Fortinet FortiGate, but we found Palo Alto Networks Panorama had a lot more features and this is why we switched.

The initial setup of Palo Alto Networks Panorama was simple. The time of the implementation depends on the environment.

We used an integrator for the implementation of Palo Alto Networks Panorama.

The price of Palo Alto Networks Panorama could be lower.

I rate Palo Alto Networks Panorama an eight out of ten.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama can be used for managing all your files at once. Its primary use case is that it's a centralized management system for firewalls. For example: we have a company with four different sites, and each one of those sites has two Palo Alto networks in there, so rather than do one integration, then replicate it four times, what we do is we plug it all into Palo Alto Networks Panorama and make the change once, and it pushes out to all the firewalls, regardless of where those are located.

What I find brilliant in Palo Alto Networks Panorama is that you can create variables. The template stack function of the system is also valuable. You can create one profile for several firewalls, and I find that really, really cool. If there's a file on the network that needs to have an address arrangement, you can just import it similar to how you do a CSV import. It's a solid product and it does what it's supposed to do.

The ease of use of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is an area for improvement, because it's not very easy to use. The downside with the system is that you need a lot of comprehension to understand what it is. There are also risks associated with making a change, e.g. you can accidentally break your network which knocks off the firewall, and then you can't get back on again. If you know what you're doing, e.g. if you're a specialist, then there won't be any problems, in general.

It's important to gain an understanding of Palo Alto Networks Panorama, or the concept, before you start. It works like Palo Alto, but it doesn't at the same time, because you have templates, and the templates have to be applied before your variables, and then those variables directly affect your objects. It's important to understand how it works. I wish they could make it easier, and a bit more intuitive, but if you're doing the training, and you're properly in the system, then it will make sense the way it's explained to you, otherwise, it'll be hard to make sense of it.

It could be difficult to get to the stage you want to be on with this system. It's similar to a different language, and it's so hard to just do it on your own, but if you are in the culture and you're speaking to other people, then it becomes easier because you're doing it. That's the learning curve right there, e.g. if you've never done it before, you'll sit and look around saying: "What is this? I don't understand." If you're doing the training, and you're more involved in the product, or even if you speak to specialists, they will be able to help you, then you start to learning it and what it can do.

I've been dealing with Palo Alto Networks Panorama for four years now.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama is very, very scalable. The way the system works is that you have clustering, so you can have all these machines connect to each other in stacks. It's a completely scalable system.

Technical support for Palo Alto Networks Panorama is good. I'm giving them a score of four out of five.

The setup for Palo Alto Networks Panorama is quite difficult, because you're essentially building this one machine, then you have to create all the log ins, then once you've done that, you start registering your files, but you have to do an ingestion on them. You have to bring the file all in, and then it takes the config then puts the config back out again, but that config will then be a "protected config", so if I was logging onto that machine locally, I can't change that file.

The setup is quite easy just to build the machine, but to get it to work is quite difficult.

I've been dealing with version 10.0 of Palo Alto Networks Panorama. I'm a reseller of this solution.

One person could do the deployment and maintenance for Palo Alto Networks Panorama, but what we do in our office is: we have a buddy system. If there's a change that needs to be made, e.g. if someone does the work, someone verifies it, and then catches any problems there, because if you're managing several firewalls, one more change might break all of them. That's the risk that you're in.

My advice to others who are planning to implement Palo Alto Networks Panorama is to look at the use case, e.g. if you have two firewalls, or if you have several firewalls across the country, it's best to get a specialist in to help you deploy it. For a regular IT guy who works in a company managing the server, etc., it'll be such a hard learning curve to go through. Try and learn it yourself if you can, but if not, always defer to a specialist.

I'm rating Palo Alto Networks Panorama seven out of ten, just because it's quite difficult.

We use it only for management. It's dependent on the customer environment. If they have more than one Palo Alto product, they prefer to buy Panorama because you can manage all Palo Alto products.

Suppose you have four or five firewalls for different environments related to the same customer. You can buy one license for Panorama and handle the management of all these firewalls simultaneously from one console.

We usually use the same use cases related to it because we're working with only government parastatals. We have certain criteria that we cannot move out of, and we should be in the same line as they provide for us.

I like its flexibility.

It could be easier to manage. In the future, it should be much easier because it's not very easy to manage. So in the next release, I think it should be much easier to manage, especially in the first configuration. It could also be more stable.

I used Palo Alto Networks Panorama for about a year and a half.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama is fairly stable. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes there is a delay in pushing the policy or configuration between the Panorama and the host.

Palo Alto Networks Panorama is scalable.

Palo Alto technical support is good, and they answer in really good time.

It's easy to install, but the configuration is not simple as the installation. Nevertheless, the deployment should take less than ten minutes.

We're an integrator, and we implement this solution.

Sometimes the company prefers to give a license to test the product in our environment before we go to the customer. But the customer should buy his own license, and that's the system here. The system is different between one country and another. Some countries say that the IT solutions provider should provide the license.

I lived in Turkey before, and over there, the customer buys the license and provides this license to the IT solutions provider. However, here in Qatar, the customer asks the IT solutions provider to do everything.

I would recommend this product to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Palo Alto Networks Panorama a seven.