GP.Facilities Monitoring

	GP	Facilities Monitoring	Version:	0.4
	Document type:	Generic Pattern	Owner:	J.A.H. Schoonderbeek

Description

This Generic Pattern belongs to "Operations". This Pattern helps Operations and Security personnel to monitor other facilities for noteworthy events. It can trigger reactive management actions, but it can also trigger events pro-actively if patterns of suspect behaviour or suspect state are supplied to the Rules Engine.

Services realized

This Pattern realizes the following service(s):

Facilities Monitoring (This service allows its users to monitor IT facilities with the aim of guarding operational continuity or security.)

Functional and Integration view

This is the graphic representation of the functional model of this Generic Pattern:

Generic Pattern Composition

This pattern is an aggregation of the following (mandatory and optional) functions, expressed in Generic Functions:

Icon	Function	Inclusion	Rationale
	Rules Engine	recommended	This function represents the intelligence that drives the services provided by the Pattern. Active collection of information, responses caused by incoming information, and ways and means to alert and/or report are all directed by (implicit or explicit) rules.
	Data Scanning	recommended	All data collected by the facility should be normalized, and must be investigated for patterns that signal noteworthy security or operational events.
	Logging	optional	This function is often included, as it enables Facilities Monitoring to monitor (operational or security) events that have occurred in the monitored systems.
	Filtering	optional	This function enables Facilities Monitoring to monitor data streams within attached systems for patterns that signal (operational or security) threats to the monitored system and/or to other IT facilities. Thus, it mainly serves to model Intrusion Detection and Intrusion Prevention.
	Status Retrieval	optional	This function enables Facilities Monitoring to monitor parameters that define the status of the monitored systems.
	Configuration Retrieval	optional	This function can be used to monitor the configuration of the monitored systems, so that any change in a system's configuration can be detected.
	Configuration Register	optional	If Facilities Monitoring is to monitor system configurations, it may be necessary to compare the detected configuration with a target configuration, and/or to store the detected configuration for reference purposes; for either of these purposes the Configuration Register function can be of use.
	Scheduling	optional	Scheduling can serve to run monitoring jobs, such as configuration retrieval, on regular or predetermined times
	Reporting	recommended	This function creates and delivers the reports that reflect the operational and security state of the monitored facilities.
	Alerting	optional	This function delivers warning messages and/or signals that are triggered by the processing of all manners of (combinations of) detected facility events.
	Controlling	recommended	If implemented, this function can be used by administrators, and possibly by authorized clients, to change the way the Pattern works. Among the changes that can be made via this function are: The rules used to normalize monitored data; The composition of reports, as well as scheduled creation and delivery of them; The addresses and methods used to deliver alerts. Care must be taken to limit access to this function to authorized systems and users.

Services connected with this Generic Pattern

This Generic Pattern has the following mandatory and optional relations with adjacent Generic Services.

Service	Adjacency	Summary	Rationale
Data Management	recommended	This service provides its consumers the ability to manage strictly structured data.	A Facilities Monitoring Pattern is likely to require some sort of structured data store to keep records of the data and events it has collected, reports generated et cetera.
Authentication & Authorization	optional	This service can validate an identity claim, and it can validate the permissions required for an action, as part of an Authentication & Authorization process.	Access to the services provided by the Facilities Monitoring Pattern is likely to be limited to authorized personnel; furthermore, the Facilities Monitoring system itself may require permissions to be able to collect data from the facilities that it's monitoring

Applied Patterns based on this Generic Pattern

The following Applied Patterns are based wholly or in part on this Generic Pattern: