Kaseya VSA – Basics Policies II

Join Sr. RMM Engineer Dan as he discusses Kaseya VSA Policies in a part II on how to create and assign a basic policy within the VSA.

Step-by-Step:

1. I would like to go over the basics of policy management in the VSA policies are very important when it comes to applying VSA settings across your organization.
2. In our previous video you learned the basics of the different functions within the policy management module. Today we’ll drill down into how to create a policy and the different ways that that policy can be applied.
3. To create a policy first we need to navigate to configure policies, select or create a folder, and click add policy at the top of the screen, enter the policy name here, and click ok.
4. I will be creating a policy that will enable the agent menu on our development workstation endpoints and then I’ll be assigning that to the development machine group.
5. Next select the policy that you just created.
6. You’ll notice that on the right-hand side there are several options available to you these are called policy objects. You can select as many policy objects as you want to configure for the policy however, best practice is to create a new policy for each major function.
7. For example, if you want to manage all of your patching settings within a policy you can go to Software Management and then adjust those settings as needed, but we wouldn’t recommend creating a policy that managed both the agent menu and software management.
8. Now before we select our policy objects let’s set a view for this policy setting.
9. Setting a view on the policy will apply the policy only to agents which would appear in that view.
10. The view is required but you can set the view to all endpoints in the system so that you’re only defining it by your machine groups. This does allow you to set a policy for many different configurations such as all servers in your environment or only machines that have a specific piece of software installed.
11. Anything you can create a view for you can create a policy to match.
12. In this case, we’ll be applying our policy to a view that contains all windows desktop machines so that we don’t see an agent menu on our servers we’ll discuss group assignments shortly.
13. Next let’s configure our policy objects.
14. First I’ll check agent menu since that’s what we’re actually configuring here you’ll notice that the same options for the most part are available here as they are available in the actual agent menu settings in the VSA.
15. Let’s enable agent icon and then we’ll enable refresh and disable remote control and that’s all we need to do to configure this policy.
16. I want to note that policies are much more powerful than this in the simple configuration that we’re performing today.
17. Just look through all the available policy objects and familiarize yourself with all the things that you can do and control with policies.
18. Now that we’ve configured this policy like anything else we need to save it.
19. You do have two options at the top of this policy save and apply and just save.
20. Saving the policy will just save the data in the policy and it doesn’t actually apply the policy to any of the endpoints in the view that you selected.
21. Clicking save and apply will immediately apply those policies to your view, so depending on what you’re doing you may just want to save it and then go assigned to a machine group before you apply your policy objects.
22. In this case we will save and apply.
23. At this point your policy is live however, you may want to assign you policy to a specific group like I mentioned earlier, and in our case, we’ll be applying this policy to our development group which is just test machines.
24. Remember we applied a view that includes workstations only to this policy so the end result will be that the policy is applied to all workstations in the development group.
25. No servers and no machines outside of that group.
26. First click on organizations and machine groups in the assignment function. Expand the tree on the left until you find the group you want your policy applied to.
27. On the right hand side find the policy that you just created and drag it into the group, click continue, and the policy will be applied to that group.
28. Remember you can assign both individual policies and entire folders to a group like we discussed in the last video.
29. Finally, you’ll notice that the tree here on the left has global org at the top this is a special organization that contains all other organizations in your VSA.
30. This special org is only available within the policies module, remember that in the last video we discussed small to big precedence in regard to policies. Any policies applied to a specific org machine group or machine will override conflicting policy set in the global org.