NACCompanion overview
From NACCompanionWiki
While Cisco’s NAC product excels at End Point policy enforcement technology, there are critical aspects of a whole solution that organizations still require in order to deliver total operational success.
The NACCompanion is a suite of modules that compliment Cisco’s NAC offering. They include: NACDashboard, NACReports, NACBackup, and NACUpgrade. Each was carefully thought out and delivers considerable value to your business. Together, they complete your NAC solution.
NACDashboard - A standalone, self updating browser window, that is capable of providing real-time statistical utilization of NAC “roles”, host operating system compilation of NAC users, NAC server health and licensing utilization, both “authentication server” and NAC “out-of-band” switch health, and key (triggered) NAC system events. This browser window is meant to be left open and to be monitored by security, network, and help-desk administrators as a snapshot tool providing visibility into key network events. Thresholds can be set within NAC Companion to trigger SMTP events that can assist with network awareness.
NACBackup - Administrators can schedule one or many fully automatic Cisco NAC backups to be archived within the NAC Companion appliance. The archived backups can later be used as restore points for Cisco NAC. Scheduled backups allow for automatic archiving of specific administrative changes and user information without the need for manual intervention. These backups are stored on the NAC server so as to create an “off-site” capable solution for Cisco NAC backups.
NACUpgrade - The upgrade module will allow NAC administrators to do a full batch upgrade of all Cisco NAC Managers and Servers simultaneously, to include high-availability deployments. A complete NAC manager backup will be completed prior to each batch upgrade. All NAC managers and servers will be monitored for batch execution and completion with NACDashboard providing real-time capable health monitoring. NACUpgrade will greatly reduce network downtime and administration associated with upgrading your Cisco NAC solution. The NACUpgrade module will also allow administrators to take better advantage of upcoming releases specific to Cisco’s NAC solution by allowing them to do upgrades more frequently. Deploying NACUpgrade takes the hassle out of doing Cisco NAC code upgrades.
NACReports - Via the NAC Companion administration console, administrators will have a subset of both static and userdefinable report options. This reporting module will allow report generators to execute specific NAC information, formatting this information into clear and concise executive-level reports for further viewing/archiving/printing via an integrated PDF generator. All reports will be available via PDF and/or CSV output.
Sample reports include:
User specific: reports that depict trending specific to a given user. Date (range) specific: illustrates information gathering over a specific date range. Scan/requirement specific: a comprehensive list of requirements and their associated scan trigger. Role specific: a list of each NAC role and the associated scan/requirements that must be met by users in order to adhere to an organizational policy. Executive-level summary: a single page report outlining NAC licensing utilization per NAC Manager/Server, providing per-role compliancy statistics, and determines peak user counts – all over a 24 hour and 7 day period.
