Monitoring Palo Alto Firewall Availability

[TahirJanwari]

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to set up availability monitoring for our Palo Alto firewalls in Dynatrace, and I could use some guidance.

So far:

• I don’t see a built-in Palo Alto availability metric in Dynatrace.

• As a workaround, I created a custom metric based on CPU System Utilization and set an alert on missing data (with adjusted violating samples).

• This works in the sense that I get alerts when the metric stops reporting.

However, our dashboard also displays another metric, System Uptime, which shows that the device has been up for X days. In a few cases we received “availability” alerts from the custom metric, but the System Uptime value clearly indicated the firewall was never down—so the two signals contradict each other.

Questions:

1. Has anyone implemented a cleaner way to monitor Palo Alto availability in Dynatrace?

2. Is it possible (or recommended) to leverage the System Uptime metric itself as the source for an availability alert?

3. Any best practices for correlating missing-data alerts with uptime so we don’t get false positives?

Appreciate any suggestions or examples of how you’ve tackled this!

Thanks in advance,

[lubrman]

Hi @TahirJanwari 
Displaying uptime unfortunately does not refer to the process uptime, but to the uptime of the server itself.

If it’s only about whether the process is present and running, I recommend using Process availability. But be careful — it’s best to configure it directly on the host group or the specific host that should monitor this. Setting it at the global level could result in false positives.

Alternatively, use the metric directly on Process availability.

[TahirJanwari]

HI lubrman,

I think you are speaking about Host Uptime and Process Group Availabilty.

I have asked about Palo Alto Firewall using SNMP Extensions