NCM Compliance Policy Reports

This article provides additional information on the NCM Compliance Policy Reports and its features. The Scope of these reports can be limited using Policy Rules. For more detailed information, see Ensure compliance to policy rules.

The Policy Reporter tool, available through SolarWinds Platform Web Console, allows defining code snippets as Policy where certain config segments must exist or not exist on some devices. Once Rules have been defined, a customer can run a report against their devices to find out which devices are compliant. This feature implements and manages guidelines such as HIPAA, SOX or internal department policies.

Rules 

Rules are created from the Policy Reporter tool by clicking New Rule in the toolbar.

Rules are defined as a simple string search or a RegEx pattern. If there's difficulty with using RegEx expressions, use the RegExr  as a test tool. Copy an example configuration from the website, and test the RegEx expression in real-time. This provides assistance with building RegEx queries.

Policies 

Policies are created by clicking Add New Policy from the toolbar. 

To create a new policy, select one or more rules for the policy, and one or more devices to apply that rule. Choose which configuration type the Policy should apply to. There's no limit to the number of rules that could be added in a policy. Users can choose to add nodes/devices to the policy by selecting them directly, or by setting a Condition (similar to Advanced Alert conditions). A Policy can also be set to check every node in the database.

Reports 

Reports are created by clicking Add New report from the toolbar.

To create a report, select one or more policies to assign to the report. Reports can be run from the Policy Reporter tool, or from the Web Console. To run a report in Policy Reporter, open the report and click Execute Report. Policy reports display a warning, critical or informational messages, depending on the rules that were violated in the configuration. Hovering over each violation displays details of the violation, and what rule was violated.

The NCM Web Console provides the same functionality as the Policy Reporter, allowing a user to create, modify and delete Rules, Policies and Reports, and run them.

To do this, click the Compliance tab to begin looking at the Policy reports.

Update Policy Report cache

To update the Compliance Policy Report cache:

1. Go to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console
2. Go to Configs tab, then Compliance
   1. If you want to update all reports, click on Update All
   2. To update just a few reports, tick the box next to reports you need and click Update Selected