AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Exam

Implement and Manage Azure Firewall Policies

Azure Firewall Policy is a top-level resource that lets you control how traffic moves through your virtual networks. It uses rule collection groups to organize rules and decide in what order they run. You can prioritize these groups to make sure the most important checks happen first. This structure makes it easier to keep your network secure and well managed.

Within each policy, you create rule collections that hold specific rules. There are three main types:

• DNAT rules for translating public IP addresses to private IPs
• Network rules for layer 3–4 filtering by IP, port, and protocol
• Application rules for layer 7 filtering using FQDNs and URLs
  Each collection has a priority and an action (allow or deny) to decide how traffic is handled.

To make rule management simpler, use service tags and FQDN filtering. Service tags represent common Microsoft services like AzureStorage or AzureSQL, so you don’t have to list individual IP ranges. FQDN filtering lets you allow or block traffic based on fully qualified domain names instead of raw IPs. These features help you keep policies up to date without constant manual changes.

Monitoring your firewall is crucial for strong defenses. Enable diagnostic logging to record events in structured formats for easy analysis. Turn on threat intelligence-based filtering in alert or alert-and-deny mode to catch known bad actors. You can view logs and metrics in Azure Monitor workbooks and set up alerts on key indicators like SNAT port usage or blocked connections.

Follow these best practices to boost performance and security:

• Place frequently used rules early in their collections to reduce latency
• Use policy analytics to find and fix unused or overlapping rules
• Summarize ranges with IP Groups to avoid hitting rule limits
• Add multiple public IPs to prevent SNAT port exhaustion
• Consider using web categories for broad URL filtering

Conclusion

In this section, you learned how to set up and manage Azure Firewall policies by using a clear policy hierarchy and grouping rules for precise traffic control. You saw how service tags and FQDN filtering simplify rule creation and how diagnostic logging with threat intelligence helps detect threats. Finally, you reviewed best practices like ordering rules by use, using policy analytics, and preventing SNAT port exhaustion to keep your firewall both efficient and secure.