Change Tracking use cases

The goals of the Change Tracking use cases are:

• Complete visibility into all virtual machine (VM) configurations
• Report on compliance with policies:
  • Security
  • Regulatory
  • Operational
  • Process
• Assign policies based on service views
• Track and report on configuration changes and compliance violations

Change Tracking and Compliance Reporting in BMC Network Automation

The following diagram illustrates how BMC Network Automation meets the goals of this use case. The steps that follow the diagram define the abbreviations used in the diagram.

BMC Network Automation satisfies the goals of Change Tracking through the following related processes:

1. The BMC Network Automation (BNA) operator can generate a Compliance Summary report. This report lists the network devices that violate the compliance rules stored in the BMC Network Automation database, and provides the ability to drill down into the details of the violations. This report, and others, use the information stored in the database that has been obtained at other times, such as when a syslog event has been received or through a scheduled BMC Network Automation job.
   
   For changes, the BMC Network Automation operator can generate a Change Summary report. This report shows the number of changes to a device over a period of time, with the ability to drill down into each.
   
   Specifically for Change Tracking, BMC Network Automation has a Discrepancy Summary report. This report combines information from the Compliance Summary report and the Change Summary report, with the time period defined as the time since the device's configuration was last known as trusted. This report shows how the configuration has drifted from the trusted configuration.
   
   
2. When scheduling a job, the BMC Network Automation operator can request that the Compliance Summary report or Change Summary report for the devices covered in the job be generated as part of the notification action, and sent via email.
3. BMC Decision Support – Network Automation (BDSNA) extracts information from the BMC Network Automation database and writes it into the BMC Decision Support – Network Automation data store. BMC Decision Support – Network Automation provides analytics capability for this data and provides versions of the Compliance, Change, and Discrepancy Summary Reports. It also provide a HIPAA Compliance Report, an ITIL Best Practices Report, and a PCI Compliance Report.

Change Tracking and Compliance Reporting in BMC Server Automation

The following diagram illustrates how BMC Server Automation meets the goals of this use case. The steps that follow the diagram define the abbreviations used in the diagram.

BMC Server Automation satisfies the goals of Change Tracking through the following activities:

1. The BMC Server Automation (BSA) operator creates specific compliance templates that define a security, regulatory, operational, or process policy.
2. Using a Component Discovery job, the operator discovers components using the defined templates.
3. The operator creates a Compliance job for the compliance template, targeting the relevant servers, and schedules it to run.
4. BMC Server Automation runs the job according to the schedule and stores the results in the BMC Server Automation database.
5. The operator can view the results of the Compliance job.
6. Compliance job results are extracted from BMC Server Automation by BMC BladeLogic Decision Support for Server Automation (BBDSSA) on a regular basis and stored in the BMC BladeLogic Decision Support for Server Automation database.
7. The operator can use the IBM Cognos analytics tool to create a view report for Compliance job data.
8. Alternatively, a BMC Analytics for BSM user can report on BMC Server Automation data by pointing to the SAP BusinessObjects universe inside the BMC BladeLogic Decision Support for Server Automation data warehouse.

BMC Server Automation achieves the first goal of the use case, visibility into VM configurations, by using live browse capabilities to view the current VM configuration. Servers are associated with specific service views by grouping components and applying policies by service.