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CONMON Deployment

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evidentia-wiki-sync[bot] edited this page Jun 4, 2026 · 2 revisions

CONMON deployment

Continuous Monitoring (CONMON) is the federal-compliance discipline of re-assessing controls on a recurring cadence rather than once a year. Evidentia ships a read-only cadence library plus a evidentia conmon CLI that answers "what's due, what's overdue?" against a state file you maintain — and an optional long-running daemon (evidentia conmon watch) that polls that state and emits audit events on transitions. This guide covers the cadence library, the CLI verbs, and both deployment patterns.

The bundled cadence library

Evidentia bundles 7 cadences covering the major federal frameworks. Each cadence pairs a stable slug with a frequency and the regulatory citation that establishes it:

Slug Framework Frequency Citation
nist-800-53-rev5-ca7 nist-800-53-rev5 monthly NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 CA-7
fedramp-conmon-poam fedramp-rev5-mod monthly FedRAMP ConMon Strategy & Guide v3.0 §3.4
fedramp-conmon-scans fedramp-rev5-mod monthly FedRAMP ConMon Strategy & Guide v3.0 §3.3
fedramp-conmon-annual fedramp-rev5-mod annual FedRAMP ConMon Strategy & Guide v3.0 §4
cmmc-l2-triennial cmmc-v2 triennial DoD CMMC 2.0 Program Rule (48 CFR Part 204)
dod-rmf-annual dod-rmf annual DoDI 8510.01 §3.5.b
occ-2026-13a-model-risk occ-2026-13a annual OCC Bulletin 2026-13a; FRB SR 26-02

The bundled cadences are immutable templates. Operators with organization-specific review cycles can register additional cadences at runtime (evidentia_core.conmon.register_cadence) — see the CLI reference and the source docstrings.

List what's available, optionally filtered by framework:

evidentia conmon list
evidentia conmon list --framework fedramp-rev5-mod
evidentia conmon list --json

The state file

The evidentia conmon query verbs are driven by a state file: a YAML mapping of {cadence_slug: ISO-8601-date} recording when each cycle was last completed.

# conmon-state.yaml
nist-800-53-rev5-ca7: 2026-05-01
fedramp-conmon-poam: 2026-05-15
fedramp-conmon-annual: 2025-09-30

You can maintain this file by hand, or let Evidentia append to it:

evidentia conmon mark-completed nist-800-53-rev5-ca7 \
  --when 2026-05-28 \
  --state-file conmon-state.yaml

Read-only deployment — the CLI query verbs

The lightest deployment is no daemon at all: run the query verbs on demand (from a cron job, a CI step, or interactively) against your state file.

What's due soon or overdue (--window-days sets the due-soon horizon; overdue cycles always surface):

evidentia conmon check --state-file conmon-state.yaml --window-days 14

Aggregate cycle health by framework (good for a dashboard or a status report):

evidentia conmon health --state-file conmon-state.yaml --json
evidentia conmon health --state-file conmon-state.yaml --framework nist-800-53-rev5

Compute the next-due date for a single cadence from its last completion:

evidentia conmon next nist-800-53-rev5-ca7 --last-completed 2026-05-01

For deterministic CI snapshots, pass --today YYYY-MM-DD to check / health so the output does not depend on the wall clock. Pipe the --json output into your alerting or reporting pipeline.

Viewing continuous-monitoring cadences in the web console

If you run the web console (evidentia serve), the Continuous Monitoring screen is a read-only browser over the same cadence library the CLI exposes — the bundled cadences plus any registered at runtime. It is the GUI counterpart to evidentia conmon list: there is no daemon control and no state-file editing here (the watch daemon is supervised out-of-band), just the catalog of assessment cycles.

Open the console in a browser and select Continuous Monitoring from the navigation. Each cadence renders as a card showing its frequency and framework, its stable slug, and the regulatory citation that establishes it; a cadence with no citation shows a muted dash. Type a framework identifier into the filter box (for example fedramp-rev5-mod) to narrow the list to one framework — the same exact-match filter as evidentia conmon list --framework.

The Continuous Monitoring screen

The cadences shown are read-only: editing review cycles or recording completions is still a CLI/state-file operation (evidentia conmon mark-completed), and live daemon health is surfaced separately via GET /api/conmon/daemon-status (see Daemon health visibility below).

Daemon deployment — evidentia conmon watch

For hands-off monitoring, evidentia conmon watch runs as a long-lived process that re-reads the state file on a configurable interval and emits audit events when a cycle enters due-soon or overdue. It runs in the foreground (no fork) — you delegate process supervision to systemd / launchd / Windows Service Manager.

evidentia conmon watch \
  --state-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-state.yaml \
  --poll-interval 3600 \
  --window-days 14
  • --poll-interval — seconds between polls; minimum 60, default 3600 (1 hour). For monthly/quarterly CONMON cadences, one hour is the practical sweet spot.
  • The daemon re-loads the state file each poll, so you can run evidentia conmon mark-completed without restarting it.
  • It handles SIGINT (and SIGTERM on POSIX) with graceful shutdown.

Alerting

Wire SMTP and/or webhook alerting so transitions reach a human. Alerting flags require an --alert-dedup-file so the same (slug, state) does not re-alert on every poll within the suppression window:

evidentia conmon watch \
  --state-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-state.yaml \
  --alert-dedup-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-dedup.json \
  --webhook-url https://hooks.example.com/conmon \
  --webhook-secret-file /etc/evidentia/secrets/webhook-secret

Secrets are passed via --*-file paths or env vars (EVIDENTIA_SMTP_PASSWORD, EVIDENTIA_WEBHOOK_SECRET) — never as a CLI value flag. Webhook URLs are validated at startup: http:// (cleartext) and private-network destinations are rejected by default to close an SSRF / cloud-metadata-exfiltration vector — opt in with --webhook-allow-plaintext / --webhook-allow-private-network only for legitimate internal receivers.

Inspect the dedup state at any time:

evidentia conmon dedup-list --alert-dedup-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-dedup.json

Running under a service manager

The daemon is meant to be supervised. Reference units for systemd (Linux), launchd (macOS), and Windows Service Manager (sc.exe) — plus credential-injection patterns, the webhook SSRF threat model, and the lifecycle audit events — are in the in-repo runbook docs/conmon-daemon-deployment.md.

Windows shutdown latency: on Windows, a Ctrl+C / service-stop may take up to one --poll-interval to react (signal delivery during a blocking wait is deferred). For interactive testing set --poll-interval 60.

Daemon health visibility

For operator health-checks, point the daemon at a status sidecar and a rolling history file, then read them back via the REST API:

evidentia conmon watch \
  --state-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-state.yaml \
  --status-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-status.json \
  --history-file /var/lib/evidentia/conmon-history.jsonl

Configure the web server with the matching EVIDENTIA_CONMON_DAEMON_STATUS_FILE / EVIDENTIA_CONMON_DAEMON_HISTORY_FILE env vars to expose GET /api/conmon/daemon-status and /api/conmon/daemon-history.

What's next

Got stuck?

  • Unknown CONMON cadence slug — run evidentia conmon list to confirm the exact slug; only the 7 bundled (plus any runtime-registered) slugs are valid.
  • Daemon exits immediately with ValueError — a webhook URL was rejected by the SSRF guard. The error names the rejected IP and the opt-in flag that would permit it.
  • Alerting flag set but no --alert-dedup-file — the dedup file is required whenever any --smtp-* / --webhook-* flag is set.

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