Hello everyone, I'm new to NCM and this is my first question on the forums. I have been tasked to move the compliance checking from our current tool (NCM smarts) to SolarWinds NCM and I'm trying to figure out how to move the different bits.
It seems that SolarWinds uses totally different paradigms to EMC smarts but i find that some of the approaches EMC smarts takes are quite powerful so I was wondering if they could be replicated.
One of the things would be rules with multiple steps, this wouldn't be too much of a pain to just split up into multiple rules in SolarWinds but the cool thing that EMC smarts does is that subsequent rules can have previous rules as step inputs.
So, imagine you create a rule and match a config block and you have a remediation script that does something to it but then step 2 would be able to either take the entire config as it's input or it could just take the modified configuration block that step 1 spits out, look for it's own config block within that and run it's own logic and so on with subsequent steps.
I know that when you create a policy, the rules are run one after the other which would be somewhat like steps but with the input always being the entire configuration of a node, you always need to declare the full logic to match a specific configuration block, which is more work, is more error prone if you need to repeat it in a few different rules, is more error prone if something needs to be changed in the logic and you need to go and update different rules and is a bit hard to keep track of as well as maybe 4 rules sort of comprise a set of checks and changes that you would always like to do together but with it being 4 separate rules you run the risk of creating a new policy and forgetting to include all 4.
example of how this looks in practice:
