XYGATE Compliance PRO (XSW) Reference Manual

XYGATE
®
Compliance PRO
™
Reference Manual
Chapter 5. Collection Specifications
XYPRO Technology Corporation 94 Proprietary and Confidential
5.1.3 Merged Collection
Sometimes, you want to be able to compare information across nodes that are not
connected via Expand. If this is the case, then you will have to collect on each node
and merge the collections together to create a unified database.
You must have the XSW host software installed on each node. There must be a port
defined on each node. When you start the XSW GUI software, you must build a
connection to each of the different nodes.
To build a collection, you must designate one of the nodes as the primary node and
then all of the other nodes as subordinate nodes. You create individual collection
definitions for each node, submit them to the host to be collected, and then download
them back to the PC, downloading the primary node first. The collection loader merges
all of the data together building a unified collection, but there are problems with this
approach that must be considered.
Important! The collection name has to be spelled exactly the same way for each
collection on each node. The collection will not merge unless the names are identical
for each node.
First, there is no method of enforcing uniform collection definitions across the various
nodes. You may define a collection called “Audit Information” on one node that collects
Users, Safeguard, Processes and Networks and on a different node, “Audit
Information” could include OSS Files, Users, Safeguard and Guardian files.
When the unified collection is built, it will contain exactly what you have specified. If
you design a query that displays OSS files that have a security value of 000, you will
get results that only apply to the node that collected OSS Files. This limitation can be
misleading because there is no way for the software to know that you did not mean to
define the collections differently. Perhaps you knew that OSS was only available on
one node!
Additionally, time constraints can cause your collections to merge components that
were collected at different times, so that the time synchronization is lost. You could be
making a query that looks for Users who have userids that expire “today.” One
connection, collected at 11:00 pm, will have data that matches “today” for the date it
was collected. The other connection, collected at 12:15 am, could have data that
matches a different definition of “today.” Again, this limitation can be misleading.
Merged collections can be very useful for comparing data on NonStop servers that are
not connected via Expand.