Restorepoint’s compliance policies are a powerful tool for ensuring that your network device configurations meet your organizational or regulatory requirements, generating alerts whenever a device is found to be non-compliant. Optionally, compliance rules can include remediation actions. This article introduces and illustrates the three different types of remediation actions.
The Basics
It’s important to understand that remediation options are part of the compliance rule definition, not the policy. That means a single policy can contain rules with different remediation options.
To see the remediation options, go to Compliance --> Device Policies, open up a policy, and bring up the rule editor by either creating a new rule or selecting an existing one. You will see the “Remediation” drop-down menu:
1 - Remediation Type "Manual"
The first and simplest remediation type is “Manual”. This is simply a text string providing instructions to an operator who is responding to a compliance alert. For example, a simple rule that checks for the existence of a default “public” SNMP community on a Cisco IOS device could have these very simple instructions:
When a device is in violation of this rule, the remediation text will be included in the alert that gets generated. Here, in an email alert:
2 - Remediation Type "Automatic"
The second remediation type, “Automatic”, lets you specify a series of commands to execute on the device. For example, to enable auto-remediation of our example “No Public SNMP Community” rule, you could run the “no snmp-server community public” IOS command:
When a device is in violation of this rule, the specified commands are automatically executed on the device, bringing it back into compliance.
3 - Remediation Type "Command"
The final remediation type, “Command”, is similar to “Automatic” except that, instead of entering the commands to run on the device, you can specify a previously saved Device Control script to run. In our example:
Here, the "Remove Public SNMP Community" script has previously been saved and contains the same commands we used in the "automatic" example:
Since device controls can be created as Lua scripts instead of simple lists of commands, using the “command” remediation type allows for more complex actions.
Summary
The goal of this article was to introduce the different Remediation options in Restorepoint. Remember: You don't have to add remediation steps to every rule in a policy -- and the ones you do add don't have to be of the same type. Even if you are not ready to enable automatic reconfiguration of devices in your environment, don’t be afraid to add a “manual” Remediation action to your compliance rules.
Coming soon, I’ll post a follow-up article about using variables and Lua scripting to improve on the simple remediations we used today.
Employee