Tracking changes in an automated world

In every IT circle, there are questions of what has changed and who did it. But what do we do about changes that are done automatically? In today’s infrastructure technology landscape, we are dealing with technologies that can (if configured) automatically do things that constitute “changes” in the environment. The best example I’ll put up as an automated “change” would be the task of migrating a virtual machine from one host to another. Another popular example is automated lab management software that will dynamically provision server systems to developers to use for code testing. This can be done with an administrator or user action, or automatically via management software.

When it comes to determining what has changed, do we need to consider also the automated tools in place? I say, absolutely. It is a two-edged sword in a way. On one hand you want to deliver the maximum amount of return for your investment in management and automation software. The other hand wants to ensure that all “change” activity is done in accordance to all policies and procedures. Most importantly, an automated “change” should not make a material change to the critical measures of the infrastructure. These are anything that affects availability, security, content management databases, and other key definitions of the infrastructure landscape for an organization.

If automated software is in place, what does the administrator do to determine what has changed recently? In some situations, the natural response may be to traverse through logs that are scattered through a number of places. But, there are options now to manage the automated changes that have occurred for objects through their lifecycle. For virtualized infrastructures, Veeam Reporter 4.1 has just been released to help administrators track this very issue for changes made either by automated mechanism, users, or administrators. To help the administrator answer the question of “what changed?” a 24-hour instant report is retained in the free product to answer this question for the day-to-day operational support role. The free version of Veeam Reporter 4.1 offers a number of features, including:

1. A customizable dashboard and a publishable dashboard to an external tool such as SharePoint.
2. 24-hour interval of instant reports of changes to the environment documenting what happened for each object.
3. Agentless collection.
4. Excel reporting on topics such as VM changes, permissions, storage management, and inventory.
5. Visio reporting on storage and virtual infrastructure configuration.
6. Storage capacity reporting.

A sample view of some of the change management reports of Veeam Reporter 4.1 are shown in

Figure A:

Figure A

Any insight the administrator can have into what has changed is important. But lining up the right tool is critical. Veeam Reporter is one tool that has just come out, and I’ll be digging into it more in the very near future. You can download a free copy of Veeam Reporter 4.1 Free Edition from the Veeam web site. Another good resource is this datasheet which outlines what is available with the Free edition.

Underneath it all, there is a fundamental question that needs to be answered. Are automated “changes” okay for your environment? I say yes, partly because I want to get my money’s worth from the software I have spent and secondly because it is unavoidable. This is already the case with automated storage tiering. There is no way that the storage administrator will be able to effectively determine which areas of disk are busy and are candidates to move to a faster tier of disk at the sub-LUN level. I’d rather have my expensive storage array do that task 24 hours a day anyways.

Are compensating controls such as tools that provide us the log of what has changed enough? Or do you demand more? Share your comments below.