Planned Change Operation – Closed-Loop Intelligent Planned Change Control

Acknowledging Events

FIM changes are summarized in simple terms, for example, for File system Events, the Event Description is prefixed with either ‘New File’, ‘Changed File’ or ‘Deleted File’.

For more details, just click on the Event Description for any Device Event to see the full detail of the change.

Once the Event has been reviewed and approved as valid and desirable, the Event can be acknowledged and assigned to a Planned Change.

Select the Event(s) to acknowledge then use the ‘Actions’ button to access the options available.

The Default option is to use the ‘Acknowledge Events under Planned Change’ and assign the event(s) to the ‘Manually Acknowledged Changes’ Planned Change.

The Event will now be categorized as a ‘Planned Change’ and therefore will be masked by the filter control for ‘Unplanned’ Planned Change Status – edit the Filter to show Planned Changes only and the Event will be visible again.

Hovering over the Planned link will display the name of the Planned Change and clicking on the link will take you to the Planned Changes page where the events associated with the Planned Change can be analyzed.

Intelligent Change Control

Creating an Intelligent Planned Change is a straightforward ‘point and click’ operation. Select the event or events to include in the Planned Change definition – a separate rule will be created for each event.

As before, use the Actions button but this time, use Create a new Planned Change to capture these events.

The default Planned Change format is to include the ‘event donor’ Device Group only, but other or different groups can be selected. Similarly, the Planned Change window start time is taken from the donor event time and left as an ‘ongoing’ open ended window, but these can also be edited.

Now delete the FIM_Test file created previously, then recreate the same file again.

Finally, create a further new file in /etc called ‘Unapproved_FIM_Test’ then refresh the Events page.

Now events are being analyzed automatically, with the Intelligent Planned Change rules being applied to each one as it is recorded.

According to the default ruleset created, ‘FIM_Test’ file operations are now approved so deletions, additions and even changes will all be automatically acknowledged as a ‘known-good’ change.

However, other file change operations not matching the rule will still be flagged as Unplanned changes.