Pre-deployment

As part of the installation process, the Plixer Endpoint Analytics hardware or virtual appliance must be configured with certain information that it needs to interact with the environment it will be deployed to. Certain parts of existing network infrastructure must also be properly configured to allow Plixer Endpoint Analytics to collect the data necessary for its functions.

To minimize interruptions during deployment and accelerate the subsequent configuration steps, use the following table to make the necessary preparations beforehand:

Requirement	Description/use
Initial configuration details	Passwords for beacon (appliance) and admin (web interface) accounts, hostname, management interface (ens160) IP and mask, default gateway IP, name server FQDN or IP, NTP server(s) FQDN or IP; Must be entered during the initial configuration of the hardware or virtual appliance
SSL certificate details	FQDN of the appliance, organization unit and name, state or province, city, and two-letter country code; Will be requested by the initial configuration script for the creation of the self-signed digital certificate and Certificate Signing Request (CSR)
Internal address blocks	Range of endpoint IP addresses to be targeted by the system (typically one or more IP networks or subnets); Must be entered in CIDR (x.x.x.x/mask) format
Network devices	List of network infrastructure devices (NIDs) that will be polled by the system; Must be added via the web interface before Plixer Endpoint Analytics can start collecting data from them
SNMP trap information	SNMP trap community string that will be used by NIDs sending traps (NIDs should also be configured to send link state and MAC change traps when possible); Will ensure that only traps from NIDs of interest will be accepted for processing
DHCP traffic visibility	DHCP-addressed endpoints should be configured to have a copy of their traffic redirected to the monitoring port(s) using SPAN, RSPAN, or other mirroring methods; Will allow Plixer Endpoint Analytics to analyze traffic between DHCP clients and servers to assign Profiles and maintain IP-to-MAC mapping

Note

The items above link directly to the relevant pages under the Configuration Guides section of this manual, but reading through this section first is recommended, especially when deploying Plixer Endpoint Analytics for the first time.

Plixer Endpoint Analytics’ starting settings can be further tuned after running the system in production for some time and learning more about the endpoint monitoring requirements for a given enterprise network.