WhatChanged is a must-have product to help IT keep on top of the Windows infrastructure.

It is inevitable that problems will occur in a complex IT infrastructure and a critical role that IT personnel play is in preventing as many problems as possible from occurring and when they do occur, fixing them as quickly as possible to minimize impact on business operations.

In businesses today, Microsoft Windows is the dominant Operating System environment, and the Windows environment is both complex and highly dynamic in nature. There is constant change in the file system and registry structure and these changes often are the root cause of system problems.

To prevent problems or to minimize their impact it is vital to be able to quickly manage and identify change .

Finally, many compliance regulations such as PCI-DSS require change monitoring on critical systems as well, and it is increasingly common to see enterprises setting up policies for allowed system configurations and monitoring for deviations from these baselines.

Regardless of whether you have compliance or not, Change Management is a vital tool to increase security and improve overall availability of IT resources.

Managing and Identifying Change

The Windows environment provides no facility to track and identify change. WhatChanged provides a quick, easy and cost effective method to monitor, track and identify change on the Windows platform. WhatChanged periodically or on-demand records a snapshot of the Windows file system and registry. This can be compared with either a golden snapshot that provides a whitelist approach to change, or with a previous state to identify change over time.

How WhatChanged helps

For persons familiar with the Windows environment the benefits of being able to monitor and identify change are obvious. One has only to think of some of the common pain points on a Windows system to realize that most of these problems are caused by changes in the system. This change could have been inadvertent, such as a shared dll being updated by one application which causes another application that uses the dll to malfunction, or deliberate -- such as in the case of malware. For any malware to work it has to get onto the system -- and this causes a new file to be created or an existing file to change.

Reviewing change, especially on critical systems, is simply good IT practice. WhatChanged enables IT to standardize on server and workstation configurations, keep on top of what end users are installing, prevent misuse of applications, the benefits are many.

WhatChanged is valuable for any person trying to solve a problem on a Windows machine, or to prevent problems occurring in a Windows infrastructure. By reviewing change proactively IT can prevent systems becoming unstable. And once a problem has occurred, pinpointing what changed prior to the problem leads you directly to the cause. With WhatChanged your systems are more stable and suffer fewer problems improving the productivity of ALL the users in the enterprise.