Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes with Tripwire Enterprise 7: Page 3 of 5

RSVP

Tripwire also allows you to define responses to changes, such as a configuration roll-back if an error is detected. You can run any action as part of a version check that might include an e-mail or notification into an external system.

Tripwire records a monitored object's state at a specific point in time, which Tripwire calls an element version. For our testing, we created a baseline as an authoritative version of a monitored object. As we made changes, Tripwire Enterprise compared the baseline with the current state of the monitored object.

When Tripwire found a change, it stored a change version of the element. While this capability is great if you don't have any other change-control product, a better approach is to use a CMDB or inventory management system to store authoritative versions and configurations. While Tripwire can store versions, it is best suited for notifying operations of changes and exceptions to approved configurations.

The reporting capability is functional but could use more pizzazz. When you run a report, the application displays output in tables and graphs, but it would be great to use the reporting engine to pull in other policy-based information and create flashier reports. IT does have a lot of control over what will be displayed in reports, which can customize to suit the organization. You can also create a permanent record of reports and archive them in the Tripwire database or export output as an XML or PDF file, as well as scheduling reports and e-mailing them to specified recipients.