Drop Rules

You can use the Drop option in the 'Create Policy' wizard as the destination to drop a packet. For a drop rule to pass a packet, it must be used together with a pass rule or with the 'Everything Else' rule, such that the packets that do not match the drop criteria will be forwarded to the tools.

In orchestrated configurations, there are no rule priorities for pass rules. However, the following is the order of priority for prioritized and unprioritized drop rules together with the pass rules:

  1. Prioritized drop rules
  2. Pass rules
  3. Unprioritized drop rules
  4. Default collector

A drop rule, by default, has lower priority than the pass rule and higher priority than 'Everything else'. Therefore, a drop rule will drop the traffic before the traffic gets passed to the destination of the 'Everything Else' rule. However, a prioritized drop rule has the highest priority amongst all the rules in a policy and will drop matching traffic before any other policy rule can process that traffic.

Consider a scenario in which the intent is to drop packets with VLAN 101 and pass packets with IP version 4. Based on the default settings, if there is only IPv4 traffic on the source side, packets with VLAN Id 101 will not be dropped because pass rule has higher priority than the drop rule. To choose 'Drop' as high priority within the policy, you must prioritize the drop rule by checking the 'Prioritize Rule' option.

Note:  To prioritize the drop rules in deployed policies, you must first undeploy the policy.