In the latest RHQ project release, and Red Hat's JBoss Operations Network product, a new feature called "drift monitoring" has been introduced.
Drift monitoring provides the ability to monitor changes in files and to determine if those files are in or out of compliance with a desired state. In other words, if I installed an application and someone changes files in that installation, I can be told when those changes occurred and I can analyze those changes.
I put together another demo for my "drift demo series" that illustrates this concept:
How it works is this - suppose you have a set of files on your machine and you don't want those files changed. In other words, the files you have now are "in compliance" with what you want and this set of in compliance files should not be touched. In RHQ/JON, you would create a new drift definition and pin that definition to your current snapshot of files. This pinning effectively marks that snapshot of files as the "in compliant" version. Any changes now made to those files being tracked will be considered drift and out of compliance. In the graphical user interface, you can see what has gone out of compliance and you can drill down to see what files drifted and even what parts of those files drifted.
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 allowing you to have a single snapshot which all resources can share. In other words, if I have a cluster of app servers and they all have the same web application deployed, I can pin a snapshot of the in-compliant web application to a drift template that all my app servers use when they scan for drift. Thus, for my entire cluster, if one of my servers in that cluster drifts away from that shared, in-compliant snapshot, that server will be flagged as "out of compliance". I will be posting another demo to illustrate this concept in the near future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment