InTrust 11.4.2 - Preparing for Auditing and Monitoring Active Roles

Monitoring Active Roles Policy Compliance

Maintaining corporate administrative policies is one of the most important tasks in Active Roles. Active Roles prevents violation of policies it defines. If policies are violated outside Active Roles, it detects the violations. In either case, Active Roles makes detailed log records.

You must manually schedule policy compliance checking.

The Knowledge Pack ensures that you are notified of policy violations, whether attempted or successful. For example, you can monitor situations when there are multiple attempts to access certain resources. The most likely explanation is that some person or application keeps trying to gain access to the resource and failing at each attempt.

Normally, such situations are detected after the event and investigated by analyzing logs or reports. The Knowledge Pack provides monitoring rules that notify you of policy violations in real time.

Tracking Active Roles Operation

You can track Active Roles server health, availability and performance in real time. This is done with InTrust rules, which help detect and resolve issues in a timely fashion and keep Active Roles functional.

Rules, through alerts, mainly provide information about the following:

• Situations when the Active Roles service is unavailable
• How the service uses available system resources
• Whether the conditions in the environment are suitable for the service’s successful operation

Putting It to Work

The Active Roles Knowledge Pack lets you perform the following operations:

• Gather Active Roles-related audit data
• Report on the gathered data
• Get notified of Active Roles issues in real time

The workflow for these tasks is no different from working with data for other InTrust Knowledge Packs. It includes working in InTrust Manager, InTrust Monitoring Console and, optionally, Quest Knowledge Portal.

The following three sections deal with installing and using these InTrust components for the tasks:

• Installing the Knowledge Pack
• Data Gathering and Reporting
• Real-Time Monitoring of Business-Critical Events

Installing the Knowledge Pack

To set up the Knowledge Pack, run the ActiveRoles_KP.*.*.*.*.msi installation package from your InTrust distribution.