How to eliminate drifts with Configuration Management using Pentaho?

Description

Drift Management focuses on audit, verification, and management of infrastructure changes (“drifts”) in your datacenter IT environment. The auditing activities provided by Drift Management assist you in keeping your data center operationally compliant with the business rules of your IT environment.

Real-time monitoring system that provides flexibility, scalability, and automatic drift monitoring. Enables organization to achieve control over their Infrastructure resources to monitor the configuration state and notify on the drifts occurred that may need remediation

Challenge

• Configuration Audits involve a team manually checking server configurations and comparing them to a predefined configuration. These audits can be costly as they involve specialized knowledge  to understand what a system should be configured as and then backtracking any non-documented change to find out why it was made and whether it should be kept.
• It was difficult to view the history of infrastructure/software changes evolved over time. Track changes to the application/software/infrastructure to determine if any security policy breach or could be an acceptable risk. It’s also time-consuming for the IT or the security team to back trace the configuration changes and modifications done to the base line configurations.
• Perform the audit and verification process as needed or on a regular audit schedule. You might want to audit the network resources most critical to your business on a daily or weekly basis and the less critical servers on a monthly basis.
• Unable to detect and understand unplanned changes in the configuration or content of a managed resource increases the risk of operational failure and hinders troubleshooting efforts.

Solution

• The dashboards provide administrators who are responsible for managing configuration drifts within an infrastructure. Since most of the issues in a virtual infrastructure are a result of inconsistent configurations, dashboards highlight the inconsistencies at various levels such as Hardware, software policy, switches and networks.
• Managing data center environment configuration drifts for high availability and disaster recovery system failures. Allows administrators to view detailed information about the hardware devices, software versions/policies, and network to effectively manage the data center.
• Provides a geographical view for alerts status/policies across the various data centers for corrective action and maintenance. The alerts/policies includes failed, upcoming and pass for current status and over a period as required.
• Option to view data by location, component, category and attributes. Data can be further exported for auditing and analysis purpose. Administration capabilities to maintain access control for the users and ability to add, modify, delete various network policies and attributes of the data center. Check our solution for Change Configuration Management

Benefits

• Provide interactive dashboards that compare current state against expected, with the ability to drill-down into granular settings across the entire stack and all tiers. Detects configuration drifts and audits your entire network. Allows administrators to view the current status of any configuration item at any time and verify, through audits, that data is correct.