Network infrastructure is evolving at an unprecedented rate and, with mixed vendor environments the norm rather than the exception, management of those systems has become a labour intensive exercise. Unlike fault and performance management, Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) has no common harmonised management method or protocols; Even the first level engineering teams have to be proficient in numerous different configuration languages and interfaces for the simplest of tasks.

Infosim’s StableNet® Network Change and Configuration Management Solution (NCCM) has been designed to be a common management platform enabling network infrastructure to be managed in a vendor neutral environment. It is a critical part of any organization’s management infrastructure and a logical next step in the Infosim StableNet® Service Assurance and Fulfilment Solution.

Infosim StableNet® NCCM delivers key functionality in multi-vendor environments to enable common management techniques to be used: real-time configuration backup and restoration to ensure a complete audit trail of changes, service continuity and fault/performance analysis; process oriented change management enabling common tasks to be packaged into repeatable processes and for more complex changes to be structured; software and firmware upgrade management; configuration policy management to enforce corporate standards and regulatory requirements; vulnerability and end-oflife/ end-of-sales tracking for compliance, asset and financial planning; and a fully flexible reporting engine which delivers the information engineers and management need.

Real-time Configuration Backup, Change Correlation and Configuration Restoration

Automatic detection of changes to device configurations as they happen means Infosim StableNet® NCCM always has the latest configuration files historically versioned in its database—This is regardless of how the change was made; e.g. console cable, telnet, ssh, http etc.

With every change recorded as it happens, the time taken to identify, analyse and rectify infrastructure configuration faults is greatly reduced as the operator is immediately given the answers to the key questions: who changed what, how and when?

Configuration files can be compared with historical versions to see what changes have occurred to a device over time, highlighting configuration items that were added, removed or altered.

Each configuration backup also stores the hardware information for the device, such as chassis serial numbers and daughter card part numbers as well as the operating system information, image and software modules in use.

With extensible device interaction scripting, StableNet® NCCM has been designed to be a truly vendor-agnostic solution allowing support for new devices quickly and easily.

It has reported by analysts such as Gartner that around 60% of all network outages impacting mission-critical services will be caused by change and configuration issues—the majority of which are small changes that are implemented in the environment all the time regardless of corporate change policies. These incidents have been shown to have a mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) of approximately 200 minutes at an average cost of approximately $42,000 per hour per incident. According to Dunn & Bradstreet, 59% of USA Fortune 500 companies experience downtime a minimum of 1.6 hours per week.

By storing the latest configurations of all devices, Infosim StableNet® NCCM is able to assist in performance troubleshooting, identify the changes that occurred and then to roll-back to a previous known good configuration with a simple two-click process.

This simple yet controlled analysis and restoration removes much of the speculation around outages and can immediately identify when the incident is directly correlated to a configuration change or is the responsibility of an external third party supplier. The days of finger-pointing, buck-passing and scratching of heads is over!

Structured Change Management

Engineers will argue that ad-hoc changes will always be a necessary evil of network management and in some respects they are correct. However, ad-hoc changes should usually only be in response to an extraordinary event and not common practice.

Infosim StableNet® NCCM is designed to move the engineering teams towards a structured change process. Small changes can be simply executed with all the security controls within the product. Larger or more complex changes can be packaged into simple repeatable actions guaranteeing carbon-copy execution. This packaging allows complex changes to be “written-once” by high level engineers and “runmany” by less specialised staff.

Every action taken by the change management engine is logged for auditing show each device interaction, commands executed and the response from the device.

Configuration Policy Management

Many organisations have internal configuration and security policies as well as external regulations and directives to adhere to. Using manual processes it can take months to evaluate every device and to rectify any configuration issues. Of course, as soon as this manual process ends it has to restart!

Infosim StableNet® NCCM has a flexible configuration policy engine enabling allowing device configurations to be compared to a set of policies to identify devices that are in violation. As soon as configuration changes are detected they are immediately analysed for violations.

Configuration policies bring together a set of devices and applies a set of rules. These rules can be based on simple text strings to find items present or missing in configuration files; powerful configuration snippets with ‘section’ matching and regular expression searching; or advanced scripting languages.

Uniquely, the same rule can be created for different vendor hardware using the same identifier meaning an organisation can create a single corporate policy within Infosim StableNet® NCCM to reflect all hardware vendor equipment simplifying reports into a single view.

Vulnerability Management

Not a day passes without another set of vulnerability announcements being issued from the hardware manufacturers. It is impractical for organisations to check their estate for vulnerabilities using a manual process as it would be a never ending task! Infosim StableNet® NCCM has a comprehensive vulnerability scanning engine that permits a user to enter the details from the announcements, run a complete check against all the devices in the estate and report on the current status.

To enable focused identification, Infosim StableNet® NCCM can use extra snapshot device interaction commands to collect real-time information regarding device configuration. This enables identification of devices that are only vulnerable if certain configurations are in use thus reducing the number of false positives.

End-of-life and End-of-service Management

Similar to vulnerabilities, End-of-Life and End-of-Service announcements are issued on a nearly daily basis and these announcements cover not only hardware platforms but also sub-components such as modules and software operating systems.

Infosim StableNet® NCCM has the ability to check against all these parts using the rich device information collected and can report accordingly allowing for financial and hardware refresh planning and risk assessment analysis.

Subscription Services from Infosim

Infosim also offer subscription based update services for vulnerability and end-of-life/end-of service announcements. These updates are supplied electronically ready to install, through a simple import function, and include any extra components such as snapshot device interaction commands as required.

Thanks to Infosim for the article.