Integrating Palo Alto Networks with Splunk

Splunk is a popular log aggregator and analyzer that can collect logs from many different sources and return information gathered from those logs in a wide variety of dashboards and “single panes of glass.” There are similar and competing products like LogRhythm, Elastic, and Solarwinds, just to name a few. Most will have similar features and varying pricing models. The free version of Splunk is well suited for a very small deployment but for larger deployments, you’ll need to compare and weigh which of the available vendors brings the best value for your money. Try before you buy is probably the best advice here.

To connect a firewall to Splunk, you will first need to set up a syslog-ng server to receive syslog messages from the firewall. Take the following steps to prepare your Splunk instance.

Depending on your flavor of Linux, the following instructions may vary. I’ve included yum (CentOS, RHEL) and...