InCenter 2.2.5 On-Premises Administration Guide  Next

Chapter 1: Overview

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The InCenter product is an administrative tool for the centralized monitoring and management of one or many Clavister Next Generation Firewalls. It also has the ability to provide monitoring of a number of other separate Clavister products.

InCenter is a Client/Server System

The InCenter software runs under the Linux operating system and comes with a 64-bit Ubuntu Linux distribution (referred to as just Linux in this publication). This is packaged as a single hypervisor image which can be loaded directly into an on-premises host server's virtual environment.

InCenter runs as a client/server system, as illustrated below.

Firewalls Under InCenter Control

Figure 1.1. Firewalls Under InCenter Control

The diagram above shows a single InCenter management client, the InCenter server and three firewalls communicating over a network. The client and InCenter server could be situated on the same computer and the network could be the public Internet.

The administrator communicates with the InCenter server through a network connection from a management computer. Administration tasks can be performed using the command line interface (CLI) via an SSH client console. Alternatively, a web user interface (WebUI) via a standard web browser can be used.

The InCenter server acts as a central management point, allowing the administrator to deploy configuration changes to multiple Clavister Next Generation Firewalls at the same time and keeping synchronized copies of their current configurations in a database on the server.

The Term "Node"

Note that in the InCenter context, each firewall under InCenter control will often be referred to as a "node". The term "device" is reserved for external user equipment such as smartphones, laptops and tablets.

The REST API

As an alternative method of management, custom software running on an external computer can interact with the InCenter server using the InCenter REST API. This is described further in Section 3.2, REST API Access.

InCenter Monitoring

The InCenter WebUI provides an extensive ability to display graphical monitoring of firewalls, regardless if they are under centralized control by InCenter or not.

In addition, this monitoring feature can be extended to non-firewalling Clavister products. These include:

  • Clavister NetEye.

  • Clavister EasyAccess.

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