Identifying ad hoc network changes

Network engineers occasionally make one-off changes without requiring any prior approvals. Reconciling jobs is a capability that ensures all changes on the network that occur without prior approval can be tracked in the BMC Remedy Change Management system.

Use the Reconcile wizard (Network > Actions > Jobs > Reconcile) in the BMC Network Automation UI to reconcile these jobs, as described in Reconciling jobs in the BMC Network Automation documentation.

Key benefits

The benefit of this solution is to enforce continuous compliance to the change process while taking into account that network engineers occasionally make one-off changes without requiring any prior approvals.

To enforce compliance to changes made without prior approval

Background

A BMC Network Automation operator reconciles to BMC Remedy network changes that were made by an engineer without any approvals.

BMC Remedy creates a change ticket, fills in the Change ID and Task ID, and assigns a Change Timing value of "Latent". The ticket does not require an approval in BMC Remedy and is immediately closed.

What changes can be reconciled?

The following types of network changes made without prior approval can be reconciled:

• BMC Network Automation jobs that make changes to network devices (that is, Deploy to Active, Custom Action, etc.)
• Changes made outside BMC Network Automation but detected after the system does a backup (snapshot) of the device
• Changes made using the BMC Network Automation SSH Proxy

BMC Network Automation can only reconcile jobs that meet each of the following requirements:

• The job is in one of the completed states.
• The job contains a deployment action (for example, Deploy to Stored, Commit, etc.) that caused or detected changes not documented in the BMC Change Management system that involve:
  • At least one device change
  • A backup action that detected at least one device change
• The job's ChangeID and TaskID fields are empty.

Reconciling a job

To reconcile jobs:

1. Open the Reconcile wizard (Network > Actions > Jobs > Reconcile).

2. On the Jobs list page, select the check box near one or more jobs you want to reconcile.

   Note

   Only jobs eligible for reconciliation have their check boxes enabled.

3. Click Reconcile.

The status column is immediately updated to indicate reconciliation is in progress. Reconciliation status and errors are displayed in the Job Details report, the Job Summary report, and exported reports.