Overview

This topic helps you understand BMC Helix Automation Console and TrueSight Automation Console product and its features. 

About Automation Console

BMC Helix Automation Console is a product in the BMC Helix Vulnerability Management service. TrueSight Automation Console is available on premises. Both BMC Helix Automation Console and TrueSight Automation Console helps you analyze and remediate missing patches and vulnerabilities in your environment. 

Patch Management

Organizations spend significant time and effort in monitoring a network of servers to keep track of the patches installed and configured on the servers, also known as assets. With application vendors releasing patches periodically, an organization invests a considerable amount of time in obtaining the released patches, evaluating the impact, identifying gaps, and eventually installing these patches. Most security breaches occur due to known but unpatched vulnerabilities. Typically, a patch administrator analyzes individual servers to determine the patches to be acquired and installed to comply with the organizational policies. This process involves significant time and manual effort. 

Using the Automation Console, an administrator imports patch catalogs from TrueSight Server Automation. These catalogs store patch metadata released by the vendors. An IT operator creates a policy based on a catalog, which runs a patching job in Server Automation. This job scans the assets according to the policy settings and identifies missing patches on assets. Operators then create an operation to install missing patches, restart the assets, and send notifications after the operation is complete. 

The end-to-end patch management process of identifying missing patches and installing them on the assets is done automatically by integrating seamlessly with TrueSight Server Automation. For more information about the TrueSight Server Automation patch management process, see Getting started with patch management .

Vulnerability Management

Automation Console helps you maintain the integrity of enterprise computing by analyzing and remediating vulnerabilities across your environment. By establishing a connection with the endpoint manager, such as TrueSight Server Automation, the Automation Console enables you to remediate vulnerabilities on the endpoints or assets.

Operators first import a vulnerability scan file, which imports asset and vulnerability data in the application. In this release, Automation Console supports importing data from popular vulnerability scanning tools such as Qualys, Rapid7, and Nessus. After a successful import, the application automatically maps assets to endpoints in TrueSight Server Automation, and maps vulnerabilities to remediation content required to resolve the vulnerabilities. The most common types of remediation content are patches, NSH scripts, and packages. Operators can also map assets and vulnerabilities manually.

Using the Automation Console, operators then create operations that perform actions on assets to remediate vulnerabilities. 

For more information about the process of importing scans, mapping assets and vulnerabilities, and performing remediation operations, see Using. 

Automation Console provides role-based access to the application. Users access the Automation Console based on the role assigned to them in  TrueSight Server Automation. For details, see User roles and permissions.