What should you do before disabling listen-only mode?

Before disabling listen-only mode, it is important to check the Virtual Endpoint Node (VEN) heartbeats within the past hour. The reason behind this is that ensuring healthy and recent communication from all VENs is critical. The heartbeats indicate that the VENs are actively communicating with the Policy Compute Engine (PCE), which ensures that they are able to receive and enforce policy updates properly. Disabling listen-only mode while there are issues with heartbeats can lead to a misalignment between the PCE and the endpoints, which can affect the overall security posture of the environment.

Other considerations, such as verifying backup integrity or changing configuration settings, are essential tasks in a broader operational context but do not directly relate to assessing the readiness of the system to enter a non-listening state. Restarting the PCE software also does not address the immediate need for verifying that all endpoints are reporting correctly before allowing them to make changes to their policy. Thus, checking the heartbeats serves as a critical step to ensure the integrity and functionality of the security measures being managed by Illumio.