A ‘How To’ for Asset Tagging

The systems in your environment are extremely important assets. Storing intellectual property, customer information, financial information, business automation, etc. If any of these systems are breached or become unavailable, there is a business and financial impact.

You’ve installed Tripwire Enterprise agents on these systems to ensure that you know what changed, that the changes were authorized and that these systems remain hardened.

But when you have thousands and thousands of assets, how can you view and report on them in a meaningful way? Not all assets are created equally. Often, not all assets are managed by the same group. Different assets run different applications. It’s a jungle in there!

Into the fray steps the Tripwire Enterprise (TE) Asset Tagging feature. Asset Tagging makes the automation of managing these assets possible as well as makes reports more meaningful for the business.

Now, having an asset tagging system is nice and all… but now we have to apply these informational tags to the assets. There are several ways to do this that we will be touching on in this article. But we need to do these things in order. Before we can apply tags to the assets, we have to create tags that are meaningful to the business. Yes, Tripwire Enterprise comes with a set of common Asset Tags for Operating Systems, Device Types and such. But we don’t know what applications, locations, owners and other types of tags you might have in your environment.

So, we’ll start with Asset Tag creation.

Creating Asset Tags

Asset Tags give you a way to assign information about a System (a node in Tripwire) to the asset item. This also creates groups for those nodes in the Smart Node Groups area of the Tripwire GUI.

There are 3 common types of Asset Tags you may (Read more...)