POLICY BASED NETWORK COMPLIANCE

A network compliance application performs a method of coalescing violation data based on rule and policy violations by retrieving network event data indicative of compliance with a set of policies, in which each of the policies has a set of rules. Policy definition includes a template of rules, definition of rule severity, and a compliance threshold specifying a number of rules of a severity that render the policy non-compliant. The compliance application computes, for each of the policies, violations, each violation indicative of a deviation from a particular rule, and displays a series of views indicative of a plurality of policies in the set of policies, each of the views indicative of violations attributable to each of the policies. From the displayed view, the application receives a detail selection corresponding to a subset of the displayed violations for detailed report display.