Remediate and rollback configurations automatically

Selected and full configuration rollbacks explained

We’ve discussed how Orca determines your infrastructure configurations and tells you when they’re out of compliance, now let’s look at what Orca does to bring your configurations back to a known good state.

What is configuration rollback?

Think of rollback as an ‘undo’ operation. Rolling your configurations back involves bringing them back to their previous settings before they were in a drifted or out-of-compliance state. In the case where you’re detecting drift against a gold standard or set of policies, you may have also heard this referred to as remediation.

Sometimes configuration changes simply do not work out as planned, or more often, unintended configuration changes were made as part of a release, or by another program, or by a well-intentioned engineer. So IT teams need options to quickly correct these situations. 

Orca offers two powerful ‘undo’ options.
  • When Orca detects drift, it will automatically remediate your configurations back to the desired state and notify you of what’s been done. 

    OR

  • When Orca detects drift, it will automatically flag the drifted or out-of-compliance configurations and alert your team. You can then kick off the remediation in Orca when the time is right or schedule the remediation for the next maintenance window.
Example: How to remediate and rollback IIS configurations
You’ve found the issue, but now you need to remediate your 200 servers. How long will that take? Do your know who will coordinate the changes? What shouild  the configurations be? Will you need a script? Who’s going to write it?

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Three configuration rollback scenarios

  1. You’ve just released your application to production, and somehow a configuration change was introduced that wasn’t approved, wasn’t needed, and is causing problems. You’ve found the issue using Orca, but now you need to remediate your 200 servers. How long will that take? Do you know how to coordinate the changes? What should the configuration be? Will you need a script? Who’s going to write it? Orca automatically gives the answers to all these questions, because Orca finds and fixes the problem.
  2. The security team has mandated new regulations, and now half your servers are now out-of-compliance. Tell Orca about your new regulation, and Orca will tell you where the configurations need to be changed. Then Orca changes them for you.
  3. Managed applications are randomly not performing correctly. No one made any changes (uh huh). But you know things were running smoothly a month ago. Orca is able to look at the configurations from last month, compare them with the current configurations, and roll back to the previous configuration so your application performs as expected again.

In essence, you can quickly go back to a known good, in a timely manner.  All without the guesswork, without the errors, and without spending time wondering if everything got rolled back properly. Also, you don’t need to worry about scripting with out-of-box integrations to major middleware, databases, and operating systems.

Rollback Configurations Example: How to set up compliance in WebSphere configurations
Rollback Configurations Example: How to set up compliance in JBoss configurations

Selectively rollback configurations for only part of your environment.

With Orca you can remediate all configurations or choose to remediate only a partial selection, therefore you have granular control over the changes you push out to your environment.

Users can roll back to any point in time, because Orca keeps a historical revision of your configurations .

Orca’s remediation workflows can also include your custom steps. Do you need to restart services or reboot as part of a remediation? Orca has you covered.

Do you want to only remediate one endpoint first, then roll the changes out to all the others? Orca allows you to remediate all endpoints or select which endpoints to remediate first.

Rollback Configurations Example: How to remediate and rollback SQL Server configurations

Video: Remediating and rolling back configuration settings

Use Orca to remediate and rollback middleware, database and OS configurations automatically

Orca cuts the time, hassle and errors out of remediating and rolling back configurations.

Request a demo walk-through.