Adding Assets

To begin segmenting and monitoring your network, you will need to add your endpoints as assets so that they can be tracked and managed by the software.

Creating Your First Asset

In the Horizon application, assets are added, viewed, and managed from the Database > Assets page.

To add a new asset, click on the Add dropdown above the asset list, and choose the appropriate Asset Type. The Asset Type is used to determine how to interact with the machine for remote management operations. A Windows Host asset will be managed using the Windows script library via WinRM, and a Unix Host asset will be managed using the Linux script library via SSH. IP List assets are not managed directly by Horizon, but they are useful for defining an IP range or network location for use in segmentation policies.

After choosing the asset type, you will be brought to the Add Asset Page where you can enter information for the endpoint you are adding. Choose a name and description to help identify the asset. Then, enter the hostname of the endpoint as well as a username and password to be used for remote management of the machine. The user specified must have administrator (Windows) or sudo (Unix) privileges in order to execute the remote management scripts. Finally, the Tags field should be filled with the taxonomy terms that apply to this asset so that it interacts properly with the segmentation policies. If this asset corresponds to a Windows or Unix machine, you should, at minimum, select the term Component::Server::Windows or Component::Server::Linux. These particular taxonomy terms are used in out-of-the-box segmentation policies that keep WinRM or SSH access open to the Horizon host, so omitting these terms could result in remote access of this asset being lost once your segmentation policies are enforced.

Once all fields have been completed, navigate back to the Root Container and you will see the newly added asset.

Asset Versions

To provide a layer of protection to the asset management process, the Horizon application distinguishes asset changes as major and minor versions. When an asset is first created or when an edit is made to an existing asset, the asset is advanced to a new minor version which will not be affected by segmentation policies. This allows for the opportunity to review additions and changes to ensure that the new version of the asset will not have any unintended effects. After reviewing the asset, you can be promote it to a major version to allow it to interact fully with your segmentation policies. To do this, click on the Actions menu button for the asset and choose Promote Major.

You can also click Actions > History to view all previous versions of this asset and revert to a previous version if necessary.

Note

Containers can only be major versions (Version 1.0, 2.0, etc.)

Asset Importing

To facilitate the addition of a large number of assets, the Horizon application offers an import feature. This feature allows you to organize the attributes and relationships of your assets in a CSV file which can be uploaded to the application and put through an automatic import process.

Refer to the Imports article for more details about this process and instructions to properly structure your asset data to be imported into the database.