Kaseya VSA – Basics Policies Part I

This video covers the different functions within the VSA Policy management module. This is part 1 of a two-part series on policy basics.

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 VSA basics series so far you’ve learned how to manage agents, create views, custom fields, and agent procedures. With policies we’ll be combining a lot of those concepts together to show you how we can automate these settings across your many organizations, this will be a two-part series.
3. Today we will be specifically focusing on the overall functionality of the policy management module we’ll briefly discuss all of the functions within the module and how they work together.
4. The first function to discuss is summary, the overview page is a static guide on the various components of the policy management module I recommend looking over this after the video.
5. The next page in the summary function is the dashboard this can show at a glance compliance information on your environment including upcoming policy events and agent and policy status.
6. The logs page will show records on policy run modifications including the date, time, policy name, and user. The policy matrix shows every policy currently assigned per machine in your environment by policy object you can filter and sort this view similar to other pages within the VSA.
7. The next function to discuss is the configure function the policies page is where you’ll create and design your policies which we will discuss in the next video.
8. The settings page allows you to set your global deployment policy interval and compliance check the deployment interval is how often new policies get pushed to your qualified endpoints and the compliance checks make sure that the endpoints that have policies applied are applied properly in the correct order with nothing overwritten.
9. Finally, we have the assignment function the first page here organizations and machine groups is where you can apply policies to specific groups in your environment.
10. For example, we can drag a folder of policies over to a subgroup and then the policies in that folder will apply to that group. It’s important to note here that policies apply top down in this list meaning if that if two policies that have conflicting rules, the policy closest to the top of the list will take precedence over the ones below it.
11. Next is the machine page this is where you can check the policy statuses easily on individual agents this is helpful in troubleshooting why policies aren’t behaving as you would expect sometimes.
12. The west pane here is a list of agents here you can scroll, hover over the scroll icon here to get a detailed list of policy object status details and machine effective policy settings.
13. The machine effective policy settings is basically a summary of all of the settings that the policy is controlling or policies are controlling on that agent.
14. Policy object details shows us the policies and how they are assigned.
15. I want to take a quick moment here and explain why the policy object details screen is so important.
16. Policies in the VSA are controlled by precedents. I like to remember this by thinking of it as a small to big precedence. Policies applied directly to a machine, overriding policies with conflicting rules applied to a group of machines, and then moving upwards policy applied to that group overrides policies applied to an entire organization and then of course we have the global org which is overridden by everything underneath it. It’s very important to remember as you’re designing your policy layout in your environment.