We have just recently implemented IT Analytics with a separate server configuration. One of the key items of interest with adding ITA was to produce complex charts. As a noob with this, I an interested in anyone's comments on how this might be accomplished within ITA. What I am showing below was done by taking standard Patch Management Compliance by Computer reports, dumping them into Excel and run a macro script to tally and formulate the data and then chart it. What we hope can be accomplished is that this can become part of the IT Analytics as a report.
In the example, I am using "All Computers with Patch Management" as a filter so the numbers represent the entire organization. In our current configuration we can vary the source to produce the same report chart on a smaller set of data such as "All Mobile Computers" This allows for clarity on success rates and compliance on devices that would be considered more of a threat on the network.
Current Solution:
Using the Patch Management Compliance by Computer, the results are then saved to an Excel spreadsheet
In the Excel spreadsheet, the following table creates the labels and the tally for each of them. The goal here is to represent the compliance % count of each to show current enterprise state as well as success.
The table is then charted as shown below. You can see from this chart that 1995 computers are 100% compliant out of the total of the total 2797. Other columns of key interest are those <80 and <90 % compliant and how many computers are requiring a restart.
I find this give the best overall view of Patch Compliance and an indication of where you need to focus effort. It also can be used to see the day before and the day after a deployment of patch Tuesday. You will see that the 100% column drops nearly to zero as patches are downloaded and applicable to those machines. When the nightly installation time occurs, you will see the Require Restart column go up by the number of computers that the patches are installed on. The next day, the success factor is that the 100% column goes back up and you are back to a high level of compliance. As many of you know from Patch Management on computers, this often takes a few days to a week depending upon how many mobile computers you have in your environment which connect in a more irregular manner than do desktop computers.
What we are looking for with ITA is to be able to have this as a standard report without the exporting and macro work with Excel. This way, it could be run on a regular basis and our security team could monitor the Patch Compliance and raise concerns when things are not the normal fully patched.
If anyone has a better way to represent this we are all ears.
If anyone knows how we might be able to pull this information out of IT Analytics and could point us in the right direction that would be great. I have looked around in ITA and although there is Vulnerability information there, I was unable to see how I might accomplish this.