Administer > Audit and compliance > Compliance > Compliance scans

Compliance scans

In the Compliance view, you can perform a compliance scan for the Audit, Audit Policy, Software, Patch, or Configuration compliance categories. When you scan for compliance, you scan servers targeted by a compliance policy to determine whether target server configurations match the policy’s rule definitions. For example, a compliance scan can check to see what patches are installed on a computer, compare that with a patch or software policy, and then return the results to the Compliance view. Or, a compliance scan can check the contents of a configuration file on a server in order to determine whether it matches the rules defined in an application configuration.

Audits do not have a scan feature; however, running an audit produces the same results. For an audit, when you run an audit, SA checks the target server configuration to determine the extent to which it matches the audit’s rule definitions.

The following actions occur when scanning the compliance categories:

  • Software Compliance Scan: Compares files on a server to determine whether they match those stored in the software policies attached to the server.
  • Patch Compliance Scan: Compares patches that are installed on a server with patch policies and patch policy exceptions that are attached to that server. The results of this scan show servers that are in compliance (have all required patches installed) and servers that are out of compliance (do not have all required patches installed). Scanning for patch compliance applies only to Windows patch management.
  • Configuration Compliance Scan: Compares configuration files on a server with the template-defined application configurations that are attached to that server. The results of this scan show servers that are in compliance (configuration file definitions match the configuration templates) and servers that are out of compliance (configuration file definitions do not match the configuration templates). See "Application configuration" in the SA 10.60 Developer section for more information about Configuration compliance.