Understanding global counters
When you are troubleshooting a connectivity issue, the log files and packet captures provide a wealth of information, but sometimes, they're not enough to figure out what is happening to a session. All sessions, whether they are traversing the firewall or getting dropped, are tracked by all the processes that touch them, and counters are incremented for each step that a packet takes and for each packet in a session. This can provide a wealth of information if something is not working as expected.
The global counters can be viewed by running the following command:
reaper@PA-VM> show counter global
This will output all of the global counters, which is not very useful. You can add a delta filter to only show global counters for the period between the last and the penultimate time that the command was issued. The duration will be indicated in the output:
reaper@PA-VM> show counter global filter delta yes
The output will look similar...
