Managing Compliance Across Multiple Resources

In the latest RHQ project release, and Red Hat's JBoss Operations Network product, a new feature called "drift monitoring" has been introduced.

If you've seen my previous blog, it (along with its demo) described how you can monitor changes in files belonging to a single resource. If a resource's files deviate from a trusted snapshot, that resource will be considered out of compliance and the UI will indicate when this happens.

This pinning/compliance feature within the drift subsystem can be combined with drift templating to allow you to pin a single snapshot of content to multiple resources. This allows you to have a single snapshot which all resources can share. In other words, if you have a cluster of app servers and they all have the same web application deployed, you can pin a snapshot of the in-compliant web application to a drift template that all of your app servers use when they scan for drift. Thus, for an entire cluster, if one of the servers in that cluster drifts away from that shared, in-compliant snapshot, that server will be flagged as "out of compliance".

To see how this works, see my "Managing Compliance Across Multiple Resources" demo.