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. This tracking is done by counters that increment with each step a packet takes or action a process performs 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-440> show counter global
This will output all of the global counters without context, which is not very useful. You can add a delta filter to only show global counters for the period between the previous and the last time that the command was issued. The duration will be indicated in the output:
reaper@PA-440> show...
