Phase 1 - Preparation - BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance

BlueCat LiveAssurance Quick Start Guide
ft:locale
en-US
Product name
BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance

1A Goals and Success Criteria

It is highly recommended that prior to beginning your evaluation of BlueCat LiveAssurance, you consider what you want to accomplish.

Common goals include:

  • Gaining greater visibility into the health of your firewalls beyond what you get from your existing tools
  • Prevent configuration drift by comparing each firewall’s configuration against your Gold Standard, industry best practices and the other members of its cluster.
  • Increase network uptime by identifying and remediating potential issues before they cause disruption to the network

1B Information Gathering

BlueCat LiveAssurance Server
  • The BlueCat LiveAssurance Server will require an IP Address (along with the Subnet Mask and Gateway). This IP Address will require SSH (port 22) and SSL (port 443) access to the devices being inspected.
  • The IP Address should also be able to reach service.indeni-ops.com on ports 80 and 443 (http and https). This is for the server to upload logs if needed, download new versions as they are released and for sending a heartbeat
  • You will also need to know the IP Address of the preferred DNS and NTP servers.
Inspected Devices - To connect to these devices, we will need to know:
  • The IP Address of the devices
  • That SSH is enabled and using the default port 22
  • The credentials (username and password) for the devices
Please refer to the BlueCat LiveAssurance User Guide for details on the required permissions: 2.1 Creating Users on Vendor Devices
Note: Please select the “Download Trial Software” for a free trial with up to 5 connected devices. Select the “Request Live Demo” if you are evaluating BlueCat LiveAssurance as a POC in coordination with your BlueCat Sales Executive.

Email notifications

If you would like to receive email notifications, you will need to know the IP Address / FQDN of the SMTP Server as well as the email address that the notifications will be sent from.

1C Server Creation

This deployment will utilize a virtual machine (VM) BlueCat LiveAssurance Server. The server is provided as an OVA, pre-built with the BlueCat LiveAssurance solution, the Ubuntu OS, and all other prerequisite applications and tools.

The OVA can be downloaded from the BlueCat website at: https://bluecatnetworks.com/try-infrastructure%20assurance/

BlueCat recommends the VM be configured with the following specs:

BlueCat LiveAssurance Version Trial POC POC
# of Devices 1-5 1-30 30+
CPU 4 Cores 8 Cores Please contact BlueCat for recommended specs.
Memory 4 GB 8 GB
Disk Space 146 GB 180 GB

The process for creating your BlueCat LiveAssurance Server is documented in the User Guide at 1.2 Installation as a Virtual Machine

If you are installing the POC version, BlueCat will require the Customer ID to generate the license:
  1. Log in to the webUI.
  2. Launch the browser and navigate to https://<your_IP_address>/
  3. Out of the box, the UI uses a self-signed certificate, so choose to proceed.
  4. Log in using the default credentials of admin / admin123!
  5. Browse to the Settings screen (fourth icon down on the left-hand side of the screen.)
    1. Select the About tab.
    2. Copy the Customer ID and send the value to your BlueCat representative.