Enabling a policy trace
- Launch the visual policy manager (VPM)
- Click the “Web access layer (trace)” Policy Trace tab
- Right-Click the source and click on ‘Set’. You can enter the IP address or an Active Directory user or group.
( For IP address choose – ‘New’, ‘Client IP Address/Subnet’)
- Destination, Service and Time column “Any”
- Action column “None”
- Track column and click ‘Set’, ‘New’, ‘Trace…’ or edit the current tracking object.
- Select Trace Level “Trace enabled” and enter a file name
- You should now have a layer with a single rule
- The source should be the IP address of the workstation, and the track object should be the object just created.
- Install the policy
- Reproduce the issue
After you are finished obtaining the policy trace file – Disable the web access layer just created.
Analyzing the policy trace
Open to https:// NODE IP ADDRESS :8082/policy
policy trace filenames can be found here.
The file name will depend on the name of the object you created.
| Example | start transaction ——————- (1) CPL Evaluation Trace: transaction ID=659540 (2) miss : time.utc=1800..2000 miss : category=(Alcohol, Auctions, Gambling) DENY (3) MATCH: ALLOW (4) connection: service.name=HTTP client.address=10.1.1.10 proxy.port=8080 (5) time: 2009-06-15 16:38:02 UTC GET http://www.google.com/ (6) Referer: http://www.google.com/ User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Firefox/3.0.11 (7) user: unauthenticated (8) url.category: Search Engines/Portals@Blue Coat (9) DSCP client outbound: 65 DSCP server outbound: 65 stop transaction ——————– (1) |
| (1) Start/Stop markers | Those markers show the top and bottom of every transaction. A transaction is a web transaction. A ‘Get’ request for example. Accessing one web site will generate many transactions since every object (html code, java, images, banners, everything has it’s own transaction). |
| (2) Layer markers | and are the most popular layer types. A layer marker means that a new layer was evaluated. When a transaction is evaluated against the policy every layer is part of that evaluation (unless it has a layer guard). Rules are evaluated from the top down, and once a rule is a match, the proxy jumps to the next layer. If you have a layer with 30 rules for example but only the first 10 were evaluated, it’s because the 10th rule was a match and the proxy didn’t look at the rest of that layer. |
| (3) Rule evaluated with a “miss” | In the above example, this rule doesn’t have a source condition, has 3 categories set as destination and ‘Deny’ configured as the action. The policy debug shows “miss” for this rule which means that this transaction did not match the condition. In this case here, google.com did not match the BCWF categories “Alcohol”, “Auctions” or “Gambling” |
| (4) Rule evaluated with a “MATCH” | This rule was a match so an action was taken by the proxy. In this example, there are no conditions, it’s simply a rule with an “Allow” action so everything would match that rule. Not that this is the last rule evaluated so that means the proxy reached the end of the active policy. |
| (5) Connection information | This line shows connection details specific to that transaction. We know that the service was HTTP, that the source IP was 10.1.1.10 and that the port used to connect to the proxy was 8080 |
| (6) The actual request | For our example above, we can see that it was a “get” request made to www.google.com. Most common types of requests are “get”, when the browser fetches an object, and “post”, when information is sent from the browser back to the server (form information and file uploads for example). http:// Regular web connection ssl:// Intercepted SSL connection tcp:// Tunneled connection |
| (7) The user agent | This line is important when debugging a problem with a web site. We can see that it was Firefox 3.0.11 that made this request, which means it’s the browser itself. Some user-agents out there will make a request directly. Winamp, Microsoft Outlook and iTunes are examples of user-agents that go directly to the internet. Those user-agent don’t support everything that a browser does so they sometimes cause problems, especially with authentication. Usually, the result of that is the user getting prompted to enter credentials. We have seen occurrences of iTunes going into a loop of authentication when the proxy was setup in a transparent way and authentication was configured to use cookie surrogates. The iTunes user-agent would not save the cookie and make the request over and over again, and the proxy would. |
| (8) Authentication status | If a username was bound to a connection, it would show up here as domain\username. In the example above, the connection was unauthenticated |
| (9) Category | url.category shows he matching category (or categories) bound to the URL accessed. If you see “unlicensed/unavailable”, it means that the license for the content filtering database has expired. NOTE: Remember to turn off policy tracing after debugging is complete. Policy tracing (specially enabling tracing for all policy evaluation) will generate lots of logs so it should be turned off when not in use. |