Compliance in the SA Client

In the SA Client, the Compliance view allows you to see the overall compliance levels for all servers and groups of servers in your facility. From this view, which is commonly known as the compliance dashboard, you can remediate servers that are out of compliance. You can view compliance for an individual server, multiple servers, groups of servers, or for all servers under SA management.

The compliance dashboard displays the results of all compliance statuses on servers or groups of servers for audits, audit policies, software policies, patch policies, and application configurations. A server’s compliance status is based on a compliance policy. A compliance policy defines unique server configuration settings or values to ensure that your IT environment is configured as it should be.

A compliance policy is typically created and defined by a policy setter. In some environments, a system administrator might be required to create an ad-hoc policy. The policy setter creates compliance policies and then attaches them to servers to ensure that servers are compliant with your organization’s standards and policies.

For example, a policy setter can create a software policy that defines a standard set of patches and packages that must be installed on a server. The policy setter can also define the manner in which certain application files must be configured on a server. A server or group of servers is considered compliant if its configuration matches the rules, defined by the policy setter, in the compliance policy.

The compliance dashboard allows you to determine whether the server’s actual installed software, packages, patches, and configuration files settings match the configuration defined in the software policy. The Compliance view allows you to view compliance for groups of servers, showing a compliance status rollup for all members and sub-group members of a group. From the Compliance view, you can discover servers and groups of servers that are out of compliance and then remediate any problems.