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FAQs about Tripwire Enterprise Configuration Control


What is Tripwire Enterprise?

Tripwire Enterprise is the market-leading configuration control solution. Tripwire Enterprise software is the only solution that provides a single source for assessing IT configurations as well as detecting, analyzing and reporting on unauthorized changes across the breadth of the IT infrastructure including servers, desktops, directory servers, databases, middleware applications and network devices to prove infrastructure integrity and process effectiveness.

What business problems does Tripwire Enterprise address?

Tripwire Enterprise reduces the effort required to maintain IT configurations, enabling you to mitigate security risk and automate compliance, thus lowering cost. Tripwire Enterprise also aids in improving service availability, reducing outages, speeding recovery and reducing unplanned work.

What does Tripwire Enterprise do?

Tripwire Enterprise is an enterprise configuration audit and control solution that proactively assesses configurations across the data center to ensure they comply with internal and external policies. We then identify and validate all changes to ensure your configurations remain in a known and trusted state. This enables IT to better mitigate risks, reduce vulnerabilities and increase operational efficiency, ultimately improving their responsiveness to the business.

How does Tripwire Enterprise work?

Tripwire Enterprise captures a baseline of server file systems, desktop file systems, directory servers, databases, middleware applications and network device configurations in a known good state. Subsequent integrity checks automatically compare the current states against these baselines to detect changes. Tripwire provides information essential to automatically reconcile detected changes with authorized and intended changes. For example, Tripwire Enterprise can cross-check detected changes with defined policies, documented change lists or with automatically generated lists created by patch management and software provisioning tools, enabling it to automatically recognize desired changes and expose undesired changes. Tripwire Enterprise includes a library of actionable change reports and dashboards to prove compliance, improve security, increase availability,and automate change and configuration management. Users can easily tailor and schedule reports/dashboards, output them in PDF, HTML, or XML, and archive them for future reference.

How does Tripwire Enterprise help me achieve and maintain the integrity of my IT systems?

Tripwire Enterprise enables the enterprise to achieve and maintain a known and trusted state. By proactively correlating and reconciling configuration activity against policies, Tripwire delivers an automated, holistic view of operational, regulatory and security compliance across the dynamic data center.

Tripwire Enterprise provides independent proof that the IT infrastructure is in its expected state and that the processes used to control configuration changes are effective.

What IT assets can Tripwire Enterprise monitor?

Tripwire Enterprise provides coverage across the breadth of the IT infrastructure by monitoring heterogeneous server file systems, directory servers, databases, middleware applications, desktop files systems, and network devices. Tripwire Enterprise is the only solution to combine both real-time and scan based change detection delivering the advantages of both in a single system of record.

How many users does Tripwire Enterprise support?

Tripwire Enterprise supports a virtually unlimited number of local or remote users with its web browser-based graphical interface.

Can I grant different privileges to different users?

Yes. All users are assigned either a standard or custom role which pre-defines their global security privilege. Additionally, access control lists establish levels of access and control for specific servers, desktops, databases, and network devices, independent of the global role assigned to the user.

How many servers, desktops, and network devices can Tripwire Enterprise monitor?

Tripwire Enterprise collects information from servers, desktops, directory servers, databases, middleware and network devices and stores them as elements. Because each customer's IT infrastructure is unique, we measure our support by the number of elements we can monitor. Tripwire Enterprise can monitor millions of elements across the breadth of the IT infrastructure.

Does Tripwire Enterprise provide multiple ways for me to view my IT assets?

Yes, monitored servers, desktops, directory servers, databases and network devices can each be members of multiple, user-defined hierarchical groups allowing them to be logically arranged in virtual views. For example, group membership could be based on IT service, asset type, and location. Additionally, operations can be performed on specific groups.

Can I distribute the Tripwire Enterprise Agent using my software distribution software?

Yes, Tripwire Enterprise agents are available prepackaged in the specific operating system's native format. For example, the Tripwire Enterprise agent for Windows is available in MSI.

Can I integrate Tripwire Enterprise with my other software?

Yes, scripts and third-party software can use Tripwire Enterprise's SOAP API or command line interface to invoke functionality, including integrity checks, change reconciliation, version promotion, and report generation. Tripwire Professional Services has extensive experience in matching your change process to Tripwire reconciliation offerings.

Can Tripwire Enterprise execute commands in response to detected changes?

Yes, Tripwire Enterprise includes an Execution Action that allows commands to be executed on either the machine hosting Tripwire Enterprise/Server or on the server where the Tripwire Enterprise agent is installed.

Can I determine if my network devices conform to our policies?

Yes, Tripwire Enterprise can interrogate a device to automatically determine if its configuration settings match specified values. Those values can be based on your internal policies or industry standards.

How difficult is it to define server monitoring rules?

Rules for the most popular server configurations and middleware applications are included for quick and easy setup. Database rules are based on ISACA (CobiT) and IT Governance Institute guidelines and include rules for monitoring the database software files. If these default rules need to be modified, Tripwire Enterprise makes it easy to do so using an interactive wizard. Additionally, rules can be centrally defined and grouped, allowing them to be shared across many different servers and server groups.

How does Tripwire Enterprise help me improve availability?

Tripwire Enterprise improves availability because:

  • Tripwire Enterprise detects and notifies of undesired and unauthorized changes allowing them to be investigated and remediated, usually before a problem becomes apparent
  • When a problem does occur, Tripwire Enterprise speeds remediation by quickly answering the question, "What changed?" If desired, Tripwire will automatically direct third-party tools to immediately restore the system to its expected state.
  • Tripwire Enterprise's reports document changes that inadvertently or intentionally circumvent change and configuration management processes, enabling managers to enforce their change policies and improve the process' effectiveness.

How does Tripwire Enterprise help me ensure security?

In addition to ensuring systems are in a known and trusted state, Tripwire Enterprise can assess system damage after an attack or internal unauthorized or unintended change by reporting files and configurations that need to be repaired or replaced and ranking violations by relative severity. Reports and archived change history provide essential information needed to enforce change and security policies. Tripwire Enterprise software can also be used to verify the integrity of security products across the enterprise, thereby "guarding the guards."

How does Tripwire Enterprise help me accelerate ROI on CMDB/ITIL/ITSM projects?

Change and Configuration Management are two key process areas of ITIL/ITSM initiatives with the CMDB at the core. Ensuring accurate data, controlling configuration drift and maintaining the integrity of the database requires that all changes are discover including out-of-band changes. Tripwire can help you ensure all configuration changes are detected, reconciled against your policies and reflected within the CMDB.

What is the difference between agent-based and agent-less server monitoring?

Tripwire Enterprise's agents audit complete file systems on servers and desktops. These intelligent agents are installed locally on the server or desktop to take advantage of the local processing power, a cached baseline database, and correlated package analysis. In cases, where installing an agent is not appropriate, such as for locked-down appliances, Tripwire Enterprise's agentless server monitoring remotely accesses the server to audit changes to critical files.

Can I automatically restore files that have changed?

Yes, an execution action can be defined as a response to any baseline deviation allowing Tripwire Enterprise to direct third-party backup or provisioning systems to restore a changed file.

What types of reports are available?

Built on the foundation of change detection and change reconciliation, change reporting is the capstone to configuration audit and control -by providing the essential information necessary to enforce change and configuration management policies. Tripwire Enterprise provides a wide array of reports and online dashboards that can be tailored to any environment to show change status and history across the enterprise. These actionable reports and dashboards provide the following:

  • Archived audit trail of all changes to specified assets including, where the information is available, who made the changes, what changes were made, when the changes were made, and how the changes were made.
  • Information to guide change management process improvements with system-wide change status and metrics, such as trending the number of unauthorized changes, capturing the change rate for a particular group of systems, and highlighting inconsistencies of changes and configurations across systems thought to be similar.
  • Documented effectiveness of change management processes showing the overall compliance level, unapproved changes, and changes that are inconsistent across similar assets.
  • Report linking for quick drill down from overview reports to more detailed reports. For example, one could start with a report that shows the change rate of selected systems for the past year; then one could drill down into a specific quarter, and then drill down to a specific month to view weekly change rates.
  • Independent reports that validate that expected changes were deployed successfully to production systems.
  • Real-time status of nodes supporting a specified service to help incident management determine outage root causes.
  • Verify multiple nodes comply with a known good baseline.

Can I automatically email weekly reports to my manager?

Yes, reports and dashboards can easily be scheduled to run periodically or triggered by actions and then be emailed to specified recipients in XML, HTML, or PDF format.

How can I find out more about Tripwire Enterprise?

You can download Tripwire Enterprise datasheets and/or attend one of our webcasts. In addition, you can also watch the Flash demo of the product that is available under the product section of the Tripwire web site. If you wish, you can also call a Tripwire sales representative US toll-free at 1.800.TRIPWIRE (874.7947) or 503.276.7500, or email for more information.

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