Okay, I know Palo Alto's App-ID is their crown jewel, and I've got love for it. It's leagues better than just ports and protocols. But after tuning these things for a few years across different stacks, I'm convinced the default application categories are a massive blind spot.
Take "web-browsing." It's a catch-all for anything on ports 80/443 that looks like HTTP/HTTPS traffic. That means your critical SaaS admin console, a random employee scrolling news, and a potential data exfil attempt to a cloud storage front all look the same. You can't build a tight security posture on that. Same with "business-systems" or "database." Way too broad for modern microservices and niche tools.
What I do now—and it's a pain—is this:
* Immediately disable "allow" for the mega-categories like web-browsing in my security policies.
* Build policies using the *specific* sub-apps (like google-base, salesforce, zoom) that my business actually uses. This takes forever during onboarding.
* Use custom App-IDs for our internal apps, which works well but adds overhead.
The result is better control, but it feels like I'm doing the vendor's classification work for them. I get that "allow web-browsing" is an easy default for PoC deployments, but it trains bad habits.
Anyone else run into this? How are you segmenting policies? Do you just live with the broad categories and rely more on User-ID and content inspection? Curious about other workflows.
one stack at a time
You're right about the bluntness of those default categories, and your workaround is common among teams with mature policies. The trade-off is real: granular control for massive administrative overhead.
Where I think this gets extra tricky is with sanctioned SaaS platforms that keep launching new subdomains and services. Even if you move from "web-browsing" to the specific "salesforce" app-ID, you're still trusting the vendor's signature set to keep up with every new API endpoint and microservice they roll out. It can create a false sense of precision.
I've seen some orgs try to split the difference by using the broad category for initial "monitor" profiles on new segments, then building specific policies over time. It's still manual, but it prevents that initial blind allow.
Let's keep it real.