Last updated at Tue, 03 Sep 2024 20:41:18 GMT
Can You Be Trusted with the Sword of a Thousand Truths?
Does the vision of what you want to accomplish appear to you so clearly that it seems real? After all, you already have the custom integrations, tools, and workflows set that make the most sense in your world. They are tailored to your organization's unique needs. They are tuned and ready to go – or at least they would be if only you could just get your data. You know that with this, you'd be unstoppable.
You want the Sword of a Thousand Truths. A tool powerful enough to allow someone who knows what they're doing to just do it. For those of you uninitiated with the Sword of a Thousand Truths, it's from South Park. The gang seeks the Sword of a Thousand Truths, which is only to be used when all other methods in the rather complex and mature environment of World of Warcraft fail to scale. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft)
The Nexpose team has recently released a new dimensional data warehousing export feature built to answer the call of customers who need direct access and unadulterated control of their Nexpose data.
Nexpose users have traditionally had a variety of reporting capabilities at their disposal, from readily configured reports, flexible templates, SQL Query Export, custom reports created as part of a Rapid7 Global Services engagement, to those sourced from our Community.
Our customers' reporting needs grew and became increasingly complex, with highly custom Business Intelligence (BI) workflows in place that required ingestion of data translated into proprietary formats. For example, they might need to supply enterprise-wide data across hundreds of thousands of assets to Tableau to fuel their visualizations.
We needed to provide another avenue for such customers to access their Nexpose data without disrupting the console. We focused on developing a way for critical functions such as reporting to scale horizontally for customers with large deployments. The answer was to externalize the Nexpose Reporting Data Model via a dimensional data warehouse export. Now that we've productized this capability, users can access and control their Nexpose data like never before.
- Scalable – By externalizing Nexpose data, console operations are not disturbed and performance is not impacted. These enhancements have shown report generation to be 100x faster using the new data warehouse versus the existing Reporting Data Model.
- Easy to consume – Unlike the legacy data warehouse feature in Nexpose, the new dimensional data warehouse exports information in the format of our Reporting Data Model, with which our users have long been familiar.
- Powerful - Users can feed the reports, dashboards, visualizations, BI workflows, and powerful features that are similar to those found in Nexpose Now, such as LiveBoards. Users who wish to power their own, proprietary analytics, be it in the cloud or on premise, can now do so with their Nexpose data.
- Better documentation - Both in the Help documentation online and inside the database itself.
- Secure - Transit is encrypted, FIPS supported.
To be sure, the Sword of a Thousand Truths is not be trusted to a newb. The problem with data today is that people either hoard it to themselves or dump it on others. At some point, just like the World of Warcraft game makers, it comes down to taking a calculated risk by entrusting the Sword of a Thousand Truths to the right people so that they can better protect what matters most.
This new and powerful capability was released as part of Nexpose 6.4.6. We will be following this blog with more detailed technical posts for those interested in further exploring or testing the new data warehouse export.