With our 34 servers now collecting baseline data in the background, we proceeded to install the NightWatchmanServer Edition agent on 45 additional servers.    Through the installation process, the servers were requesting confirmation of the certificate exchange between CSC servers and the agent.  The server had a certificate, however, out-of-the-box, the agents did not.  Each different client has their own certificate and has to be issued per the certificate server.  The software supports client certificates however the agent installer was not configured to create the necessary registry keys. 1E wrote a custom install script to utilize client side certificates.  This new code was added to the new agent installer release.   

We needed to begin ‘training’ the NightWatchmanServer Edition agent on what business processes constituted as useful work at CSC.   By default out-of-the-box, the agent considers some system administration activity as useful but it ispossible to streamline what is captured by the tool as useful, thus tailoring your reports and recommendations.  In our first pass, we left our baselines using the default list of administration processes with the goal of revisiting once our baseline was established.  This would allow us to create future processes where we would be able to do mass changes on multiple servers at a time in future installations based on our pilot research.

With 79 servers now running the NightWatchman Server Edition agent, we began looking forward to our first set of reports.  This brought us back to our original concerns around the ITAR data restrictions CSC has on some of the servers in the pilot.  1E addressed this issue by writing custom reports removing the server name from the out-of-the-box report and replaced it with a server asset tag (fed into the database through the original code change done to our agent earlier on in the pilot).

With reports now ready to go, next week we will share our preliminary results!