Introducing SAUGO 360 Golden Config Manager
Modern networking infrastructure is increasingly complex and difficult to configure and validate. Golden Config Manager provides network administrators with the ability to easily oversee and validate the whole configuration life-cycle of network devices from a powerful, yet simple, Graphical User Interface.
The video below, showcases how our product can be used to define your standards, and then bring network devices into compliance with those standards.
The Golden Config Manager allows network administrators to easily and effectively manage the configuration life-cycle by defining the configuration parameters, and then sailing smoothly through the steps of onboarding, provisioning, audit and remediation.
The Golden Configuration Parameter Database
the Golden Config Manager organizes parameters in a hierarchical tree structure where they can be configured at different levels, along with the ability to extend and override values from lower levels.
This allows administrators to specify policies & standards at different scopes in their networks, along with the ability to create exceptions and special cases.
These parameters are used to generate golden configurations for devices specifying what should be there.
Automating the generation & enforcement of golden configuration allows operators to:
- formalize their policies & standards
- minimize inefficient & error-prone manual configuration
- increase overall availability & robustness of their network
Onboarding Devices
New [live] devices can be easily added using the Onboarding feature which guides administrators through the process of:
- Extracting Golden Config Params from devices
- Validating extracted params by comparing them to higher-level standards
- Reviewing exceptions and approving/rejecting them
all from a user-friendly GUI.
Administrators have the ability to review and make decisions regarding extracted parameters.
Live devices in the network can be easily onboarded to Golden Config Manager. It pulls their configurations and extracts the needed device-specific parameters into the Golden Config Parameter database (Golden Config Params).
Device parameters that deviate from higher-level standards are marked and administrators are given the choice to accept or reject them.
Moreover, a special onboarding procedure called Greenfield Onboarding allows administrators to:
- Configure initial (day-zero) parameters
- Generate device configuration for undeployed devices
- Extract a file containing standard configuration
Devices that have not yet been deployed can be initially configured for basic connectivity functionality, and possibly more advanced features. This initial configuration can be extracted in text format as file to be added to the device manually before its deployment in the network.
Provisioning Parameters
An administrator can populate Golden Config Parameters and run a variety of checks & comparisons on them.
Multilevel comparisons help administrators identify exceptions and deviations of low-level standards from those at higher levels.
The GUI also allows for:
- Accepting deviations
- Rejecting deviations
- Updating deviations
- Pushing deviations to become higher-level standards
Device-level parameters can be compared to those at customer-level to identify how a device deviates from customer standards.
The Administrator is then given the choice to accept/reject the deviation, update the deviating parameter, or push the deviating value to become part of the customer standard.
Auditing Devices
An administrator can schedule audit jobs and run them against a set of devices and a set of rules, chosen by the administrator.
Device Configuration and Golden Config Params are used to generate a Compliance Report which shows a detailed per-device, per-rule summary consisting of:
- Device Config: Config that is currently on the device
- Golden Config: Config that should be on the device
- Config Changes: What changes need to be applied
displayed in a flexible way in multiple views on the GUI.
A group of devices can be selected to be audited for BGP, OSPF, and static routing rules only.
The Compliance Report shows if devices agree with golden config and how to fix them.
Remediating Devices
After running an audit job and viewing the results in a Compliance Report, Remediation is used to bring back misconfigured devices into compliance with golden config.
An administrator can create remediation jobs and selectively run them against a set of devices and a set of rules from those included in the Compliance Report.
A Compliance Report shows violations for a group of devices in BGP, OSPF, and static routing rules.
A remediation job can be created for a subset of those devices to fix OSPF configuration only.
SAUGO 360’s Golden Config Manager is the product of tens of feedback iterations with end-users and network operators.
It comes to ease the process of configuration management by providing a reliable, scalable, and user-friendly solution to the problem. Thus, saving time, decreasing cost, and increasing network availability.
