Other Connections You Can Log

So that you log only critical connections, enable connection logging on a per-rule basis. If you enable connection logging for a rule, the system logs all connections handled by that rule.

You can also log connections handled by policy default actions. Depending on the rule or default action (and for access control, a rule's inspection configuration), your logging options differ.

Prefilter Policy: Rules and Default Action

You can log connections (including entire plaintext, passthrough tunnels) that you fastpath or block with a prefilter policy.

Prefiltering uses outer-header criteria to handle traffic. For tunnels that you log, the resulting connection events contain information from the outer, encapsulation headers.

For traffic subject to further analysis, logging in the prefilter policy is disabled, although matching connections may still be logged by other configurations. The system performs all further analysis using inner headers, that is, the system independently handles and logs each connection within an allowed tunnel.

Decryption Policy: Rules and Default Action

You can log connections that match a decryption rule or decryption policy default action.

For blocked connections, the system immediately ends the session and generates an event. For monitored connections and connections that you pass to access control rules, the system generates an event when the session ends.

Access Control Policy: Security Intelligence Decisions

You can log a connection whenever it is blocked by the reputation-based Security Intelligence feature.

Optionally, and recommended in passive deployments, you can use a monitor-only setting for Security Intelligence filtering. This allows the system to further analyze connections that would have been blocked by Security Intelligence, but still log the match. Security Intelligence monitoring also allows you to create traffic profiles using Security Intelligence information.

When the system logs a connection event as the result of Security Intelligence filtering, it also logs a matching Security Intelligence event, which is a special kind of connection event that you can view and analyze separately, and that is also stored and pruned separately. So that you can identify the matching IP address in the connection, host icons beside blocked and monitored IP addresses look slightly different in the tables on the pages under the Analysis > Connections menus.

Access Control Policy: Rules and Default Action

You can log connections that match an access control rule or access control policy default action.