Athena Security has recently announced availability of the Configuration Debugger, a software solution that network engineers can use for offline troubleshooting of service availability issues on Cisco, Check Point and Netscreen firewalls. As noted in this Dark Reading news story, rather than using actual packets, Athena analyzes how ‘virtual packets’ would traverse all of the ACL, NAT and route rules that match the search criteria.
“Since time and resources for all enterprise network operations groups is severely constrained, having to pull away from other high priority projects to scramble when something goes wrong has costly consequences.
“It is estimated that network engineers can spend hours troubleshooting a single firewall deployed in a typical production environment. If the network has more than one or two firewalls, the whole day could be totally lost.
“With the introduction of Athena’s Configuration Debugger Tool, an engineer takes minutes to isolate the rules responsible for common problems such as a server that can’t be accessed or a service that is being blocked.”
