SRX Flow Logging

So I am loving me some Juniper over Cisco for sure.  But there are a lot of things to get used to anymore as well.  One is logging.  How does it work?  What happened to seeing stuff fly across the screen and lock my console up?  Ah the fun old days.  

So trying to troubleshoot some BGP on the SRX I had to play with logging.  I tried and tried to make it work and well kept falling flat.  That is because I was in the wrong dang area.  I was trying to look at flows coming across the device and tried doing traceoptions in security and in policies.  Both did not work.  To make this work I found an article on what i was missing.

Basically I had to enable logging under security flow.  Some people are probably reading that and going duh but these are my notes so whatever.  

Anyways I didn't do a packet filter because I am on a small home grown network but I did play around and found what I wanted and more.  

Below is my setup for a quick logging setup to see what is passing through the firewall

jmctsm@srx05# show security flow    

traceoptions {

    file flow_log size 1m files 100;

    flag basic-datapath;

}

That way all I had to do was run a show log flow_log to see what was passing.  That showed me what I wanted to see and more.  That BGP to my device didn't work as I wanted it not to but BGP from the device to an outside device did work.  

And on to other things.