About Change Management

Some organizations need to implement a formal approach to deploying configuration changes. This might include more auditing, and an official approval process that must happen before configuration changes can be made to a device.

If your organization uses a more formal configuration change process, you can enable Change Management to enforce the process. With Change Management, administrators must open tickets before they can make configuration changes. Then, once the change is complete, they must submit the ticket for approval before they can deploy the proposed changes. This allows you to enforce your official approval process and ensure that the right employees make the final decisions.

When using Change Management, administrators can see their own changes within a ticket, but they cannot see changes anyone else has made within a ticket. Because a policy is locked once a user makes a change within a ticket, users should not be able to make interfering changes. However, users will not be able to make changes while another user has made a change that is pending approval.

Administrators can create multiple tickets so that a single ticket contains only logically-related policy changes. Tickets with a more limited scope are also easier to evaluate and approve quickly.

The following topics explain the Change Management Workflow and which policies and objects are subject to the ticketing and approval process.