A service of celebration and thanksgiving for the life of Chris East

[0:00]Well, hello there. Welcome back. My name is Alex and this is the first in a series of videos where I'm going to take you through all the different features and functionality inside of the new release of the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center 7.2. Now in this first video, we're going to take a look at the dashboard. Some of the features and functionality there. And I want to do that with a little bit of a different take. I want to show you how you can go in and customize the dashboard and make it relevant for the way you want to work. So with that, let's go ahead and hop over to the FMC and let's take a look. All right. Now that we are in the firewall management center, let's go ahead and navigate over to the dashboard. You can do that by just clicking on the dashboard link up top. And what we're going to do is take a look at some of the default dashlets. I'm going to explain to you what some of them are. But then I'm also going to show you how you can go in and customize your own dashboard to show the data that's relevant to you. Okay, so we're starting off here on the default dashboard that's delivered with the firewall management center 7.2. And as you can see, there's quite a few different dashlets that are put in place already. And some of them might be relevant to you, some of them might not. So that's why I'm going to show you how to go in and kind of change those around. But as we scroll down the screen, you'll see there's a few different ones that are already enabled for us to take a look at. And if we scroll all the way down, you'll notice at the very bottom, there's a little bar chart that shows the current event rate. Right. So basically how many logs are coming in per second? And as you can see, my event rate is pretty low, so there's not a lot of information going on in my lab environment right now, but yours might be substantially higher. Okay, so the first thing I want to do is I want to show you how to go in and add a dashlet. So you can click on the Add Dashlet button right here. And then you'll see that there's a whole bunch of different dashlets that are already created for you in place that you can choose from. Now, for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm going to create my own dashboard that shows the information that I want to see on a daily basis. Right. And I'm going to pick some of these that are already created, but then I'm also going to create a custom dashlet to show you that feature as well. So the first thing I want to do is, because I'm on a lot of different customer calls and I'm asked a lot about the health of the appliances. I want to add in a system status dashlet. Right. So that's the first one that I'm going to add. And then the other one I want to add is I want to know if there's any critical events going on. Right. So I'm going to choose the Critical Events dashlet as well. And then I also want to take a look at maybe the top applications that are being used within my network. And I might want to take a look at the top intrusion policies that are being hit within my network as well. So I've chosen four dashlets that are already created. And as you can see here, you just click the Add button. Now, if I click the Add button, it's going to add it to my current dashboard. So I don't necessarily want to do that. I want to create a brand new dashboard. Right. So what I can do is just scroll all the way up to the top, click on the Dashboard menu item, and then I'm going to click on Create New Dashboard. And I'm going to call this Alex's Custom Dashboard. Right. Because this is the way I want to see the data. Right. This is the relevant information to me. And then from there, I can add in the dashlets that I just picked, so the system status dashlet. I'm going to click Add there. I'm going to click on the Critical Events dashlet. I'm going to add that. And then the top applications. I'm going to click the Add button there. And then I'm also going to take the top intrusion policies and add that as well. Now that I've done that, I can close this particular window and you'll see now that I have my own custom dashboard. Right. So here's the system status dashlet. Here's the critical events. Here's the top applications and the top intrusion policies. Now, one of the things you'll notice is that they're kind of stacked on top of each other right there, not organized very well. So I'm going to show you how to organize them and make them look a little bit nicer. So if you click on the icon up here in the top right hand corner of the dashlet, you'll see a little drag dashlet icon. Right. So you can use that to drag this to where you want it. So I'm going to put the system status and the critical events right next to each other. And then I'm going to take the top applications and put that underneath the system status, and then I'm going to put the top intrusion policies right next to the top applications. Now that looks a little bit better, a little bit more organized for me. But now I want to show you how to create a custom dashlet. And the way we do that is by adding a dashlet and then clicking on the Create New Dashlet button down here at the bottom. And for the purposes of this dashlet, I want to see the top URL categories that are being visited in my network. Right. So I'm going to call this top URL categories. And then what I can do is I can choose what type of dashlet I want to show. Now, you can show a table of data, a bar chart, a pie chart, a timeline or a map. I'm going to go ahead and choose a table just because it's easier to view the data that way. And then for the event type, I'm going to choose connections. Right. Because the URL data is found within the connection events. And then for the table columns, I'm going to choose a few different items here. So I want to know the destination URL category. So that's the first thing that I want to add in. And then I also want to know the URL. Right. So that's the next thing I'm going to choose. And then I also want to choose the sum of the URL counts that are being hit within the network. So this will show me the top URL categories that are being visited, the actual URL, and then how many times that URL is being visited. Right. So then for the filters, I can go in and add a filter if I want to, but I'm just going to leave it at the default of showing all of the URLs. And then I can click on the preview button and you'll see what the table is going to look like. So here's all of the data that's coming in right now. I don't have a lot of URL data. I don't have a web server or anything like that in my environment, so I'm not going to see a whole lot of data coming in right now. But yours might be substantially higher. And this might be something that you would want to monitor within your network. And then from there, I can click the Add button. And now I have my new dashlet created. I'm going to go ahead and close this window and you'll see here that it's been added to my particular dashboard. And I'm going to drag this to where it's a little bit more organized and you'll see that it's going to fit in with the rest of the dashlets that I have on my custom dashboard. All right. Now that you've seen how to go in and add a custom dashlet, you can play around with that and you can make it specific for the data that you want to see. And as you can see, there's quite a few different items in the drop down for connections. If you click on the event type, you'll see that there's also intrusion events and malware events and discovery events that you can create custom dashlets for, so you can make this specific for the information that you want to see. And then the final thing I want to show you about the dashboard is you can actually go in and customize the individual dashlets that are already created. So you can click on the little pencil icon and you'll see that you can change the title. You can choose a new type. You can also go in and add filters if you want to. So if you only want to see critical events from a certain firewall, you can go in and add that filter here. And then you can also specify the time range of data that you want to see. Right. So right now it's set to last two hours, but you can set it to the last 24 hours, the last seven days, the last 30 days, or even a custom range if you want to. And then once you've made those changes, you can just click the Save button and it'll save it to your dashboard. And you can do that for each of the individual dashlets as well. So that concludes this video on the dashboard, the features and functionality there. And I hope you've enjoyed it. And I hope you've learned something new today. And please stay tuned for more videos on the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center 7.2. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one.