How Does MachineTruth Work?
It all starts with your devices.
MachineTruth analyzes and models your network environment(s) as your devices see it. It starts with our analytics platform performing a large scale analysis of the configuration files of your devices.
Usually clients obtain these configurations from their centralized configuration store. If you haven't yet centralized your configurations, MSI has tools, scripts and engineers to help you gather the configurations from your various devices.
The MachineTruth Process
Building the Knowledge Base
As MachineTruth analyzes the configurations, it identifies and alerts to devices it has learned about but that are missing from the configuration data set. After a few iterations of configuration analysis, we usually have a complete or high enough confidence in the data set to move forward.
Adding Context, If Desired
While basic maps and analysis can be performed using only device configs, often we want more complex mapping or we want to perform more contextual analysis. To do this, we often add additional data such as routing tables, DNS zone files, netflow or packet capture data to the knowledge base.
Analytics, Processing & Modeling
In this phase, the analytics engine performs a variety of processing, learning and modeling tasks with the knowledge base. The data is analyzed using various techniques, depending on the deliverables desired.
Now The Fun Begins :: Deliverables
Inventory
Network devices, servers and workstations can be listed in a variety of formats, along with several types of characteristics. You can get this deliverable as a document, a data set for injestion into a database or a variety of other formats.
Trust, Authentication & Segmentation
Reports and documentation of the inherent trust relationships in the network configurations can be created. This can include authentication analysis and modeling. If the network is segmented, each segment can be profiled independently, if desired to further enhance compliance efforts.
Network Map
Maps of the network itself in a variety of flavors - routing-centric, logical connectivity, physical connectivity, network flows, service and application specific flows, etc.
Customized Deliverables
Now is the time to get creative. If you'd like to see a specific model visualized, play out a "what if" scenario or if you would like to see your data sliced and diced in a specific way, all you have to do is ask. Our analysts will do our best to make your data dreams come true!
MachineTruth Subscriptions Or AD-Hoc Updates
We know network documentation upkeep is a challenge. Every day, the network changes, new systems come online and old systems are removed. Networks are always in flux.
That's why we offer two different options for updates to your MachineTruth knowlebase and deliverables.
The first, a subscription package, offers discounted updates on a monthly or quarterly basis. Often, this includes ongoing help from our engineers to gather additional configs and updates to the context data. The ongoing collaboration of our teams usually makes these updates easy, fast and effecient.
The second, more expensive, approach is to buy updates on an ad-hoc basis. This usually means a significantly larger effort to gather the configs, ensure that we have all of the devices in the knowledgebase and reperformance of the analytics and deliverables creation. While we don't see this process as optimal, we understand that some clients need this option - thus its availability.
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