The latest Gears release includes improved NAC integration capabilities, enhanced cloud APIs and news about our upcoming webinar!
We've added new functionality to provide enhanced integration with secure access solutions, including NAC. Gears is designed for simple yet powerful integration with any secure access solution. We provide integration guides for secure access products including Citrix, Cisco, Juniper, Dell SonicWALL, F5, and (recently added) ForeScout CounterACT. With additional integrations in progress for Inverse (the developers of PacketFence), BlueCat Address Manager, and PFU iNetSec we are always finding opportunities to further complement these products!
Critical Issues
Some network access control products are capable of placing devices into different access roles according to their compliance state. This type of access control is growing in popularity because it provides many benefits for the network admin and enduser alike in increasingly diverse environments. To facilitate this type of granular access control, Gears has added a criticalissue option in device policy definitions.
This new option is available on the device policy page. Once enabled, Gears cloud APIs can return this information for the device, or even per compliance category. The devices and device details APIs are both updated to return information about the critical issue state of endpoints.
A common scenario may be to give full intranet access to devices with no issues of any kind, limited intranet access to devices with regular issues but no critical issues, and block access to devices with critical issues.
We will soon be enhancing the dashboard with an Alerts feature to provide visualization of devices with critical issues.
Devices in Pending State
The devices and device details APIs have also been updated with a new return value for status. In addition to compliant (0), and non-compliant (1), these APIs will now return pending (3) if the device in question is new and has not yet reported its status to Gears cloud.
Device Search API: GET/devices/search
Gears users can now create their own searches using this new device search API. Designed for maximum flexibility, this API can be used to search for devices by device name, device ID, MAC address, IP address, username or any combination thereof.
Device Stats API: GET/devices/stats
The new device statistics API can be used to return a list of devices meeting certain criteria. Examples include:
- Return all devices added in the last year
- Return all devices not seen in the last month
- Return all devices with an out-of-date Gears client
For flexibility, results can be provided as device IDs or MAC addresses.
Upcoming Webinar
Join us on October 30th at 10am PDT to learn about enhancing your organization’s endpoint assessment and compliance capabilities by leveraging the new integration between Gears and the Open Source NAC solution, PacketFence!
Ludovic Marcotte of Inverse Inc., the developers of Packetfence, and I will be hosting the upcoming webinar as we discuss the new partnership, how to leverage this combined solution and the simple integration process.
Additional Updates
- Device reporting interval can now be set to every 30 minutes
- Minor UI rendering issue with Chrome 38.0 is fixed
- Over 200 new OESIS methods added for product detection and remediation
Coming Soon
There are some big updates we have planned for future Gears releasing including:
- Revamped event logs
- Redesigned device remediation page
- GUI for Gears application for Mac (available now on Gears beta)
- NAC for SaaS / Browser Cookie API (available now on Gears beta)
- OESIS V4 for Gears on Windows: Smallter, Faster, More Powerful (available now on Gears beta)
If you're interested in trying any of the new features available in Gears beta, feel free to contact us.
