Network Compliance Dashboard with Drill-Down Violation Views
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Solution Overview
Problem
In large information networks, identifying and verifying numerous rules across interconnected elements becomes cumbersome, and managing multiple policies driven by external factors such as corporate directives and compliance laws is complex, making it difficult to maintain network predictability and compliance.
Innovation Solution
A network compliance management system that uses a passive probe mechanism to populate a configuration management database with real-time data, a policy manager to identify and evaluate rules, and a display engine to provide a dashboard view for users to monitor compliance, allowing drill-down queries for specific rule violations and severity analysis.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If multiple policies with numerous rules are implemented to maintain network predictability and compliance, then network management reliability is improved, but the complexity of identifying and verifying each rule across the network increases substantially
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a policy management system that acts as an intermediary between network elements and administrators. This system automatically collects configuration data from network elements, evaluates it against stored policies and rules, and presents compliance information to administrators. The intermediary handles the complex task of rule verification across numerous network elements, relieving administrators from manually checking each rule while maintaining reliable policy enforcement.
2Reliability
If a comprehensive set of rules is enforced across all network elements, then policy compliance is improved, but the time and resources required to identify and verify each rule increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-configuring policies and rules in the policy management system before they need to be evaluated. Configuration data from network elements is collected and stored in advance. When compliance evaluation is needed, the pre-prepared data and pre-configured policies can be quickly matched and evaluated, significantly reducing the time required for rule verification compared to on-demand collection and analysis.
3Measurement precision
If detailed monitoring of each rule violation is provided, then measurement precision of compliance status is improved, but the complexity of the dashboard interface and data processing increases
Solution Approach 1:
The dashboard interface is segmented into multiple hierarchical levels. The top level provides an overview of overall policy compliance status. Users can drill down to see specific policy violations, then further drill down to individual rule violations, and finally to specific network elements involved. This segmentation allows precise measurement and monitoring of compliance at each level while keeping the interface manageable by displaying only relevant details at each hierarchical stage.
Data Source
AI summary
A network compliance application performs a method of coalescing violation data based on rule and policy violations by retrieving network event data indicative of compliance with a set of policies, in which each of the policies has a set of rules. The application computes, for each of the policies, violations, each violation indicative of a deviation from a particular rule, and displays a summary view indicative of a plurality of policies in the set of policies, the summary view indicative of violations attributable to each of the policies. From the displayed summary view, the application receives a detail selection corresponding to a subset of the displayed violations in the summary view; displays, for the received detail selection, a violation view having a sequence of ranked violation entries corresponding to the detail selection.