Contact us anytime to know more — Abhishek P., Founder & CFO CISIN
Configuration management software allows administrators to quickly set up IT systems such as workstations or servers and then deploy and maintain identical replicas, replicating configuration across new workstations/servers/workstations or servers.
Configuration assessments and drift analyses enable IT teams to identify systems which have deviated from their desired state and require patching, updates or reconfiguration to bring them back into line with the desired behavior.
Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs), part of IT Service Management (ITSM), are databases designed to record each configuration item (CI) involved with providing IT services.
A CMDB holds information regarding any dependencies or changes to configuration that have taken place over time, thus enabling IT teams to keep tabs on them all and map relationships amongst CIs.
Why Configuration Management Matters?
Corporate environments rely heavily on IT departments for managing various systems and applications such as cloud computing, networks, servers and storage solutions.
Preventative maintenance is essential in keeping systems functioning at optimal performance - as important as proper installation is.
The State of Security report identified system misconfiguration as one of the primary sources of security incidents among containerized or Kubernetes-orchestrated environments, leading to security incidents like configuration drift and slower systems, as well as increased risks or outages.
Configuration management provides a way out by setting clear documentation, maintenance and change control guidelines.
So systems are configured accurately across diverse environments.
Configuration management and change management are two distinct ITSM processes. They represent your company's policies and procedures for updating infrastructure or responding to events like service degradation or outages.
IT teams use software to design, implement and administer baseline system settings. Configuration management software helps system administrators track current applications and services to detect issues early and prioritize accordingly while verifying the completion of actions taken.
Configuration management software provides valuable assistance for teams:
- Sort and classify systems and subgroups.
- Modify base configurations centrally.
- All systems affected by the new setting should be updated.
- Automatically identify and patch your system.
- Recognize outdated, non-compliant, and poorly performing arrangements.
- Prioritize the necessary actions.
- Apply prescriptive remedies.
What Is Configuration Management (CM)?
We can select an effective tool once we understand the software configuration management's importance. Configuration management falls within systems management.
It ensures that servers, software and systems operate consistently within parameters while managing resources to keep all updates as planned regardless of additions and deletions. With configuration management at work in your network infrastructure, all systems remain on track while everyone works together seamlessly.
What Are Configuration Management Tools?
These tools help maintain consistency between physical and logical assets, tracking configuration items as they document functional dependencies to help IT departments better comprehend any impacts caused by altering one thing.
Many configuration management tasks can also be automated to reduce error risks while freeing personnel up for other duties.
Why Do We Need Configuration Management Tools?
Configuration management software makes life simpler for anyone managing digital assets. They help maintain accurate records about computer systems and their standards while offering timely updates as necessary.
Here are a few of the more widely used configuration management tools:
- Application deployment
- Automatic provisioning
- Infrastructure automation
- Node Management
- Organized by the Orchestration
- Access control based on role
- Task management
- Visualization and Reporting
Configuration management software has many benefits:
- Reduced likelihood of security breaches and outages.
- Avoiding duplication of technology assets is cost-effective.
- Enforce policies and procedures to tighten process control.
- Problems can be resolved faster.
- Change management is made more accessible by using the baseline configuration.
- Service restoration is faster.
DevOps configuration management tools perform essential functions, like the deployment and upkeep of applications and infrastructure, provision environments and automating labor-intensive tasks that could otherwise take hours to do manually.
By automating them instead, these DevOps tools save time and significantly reduce human error - known as comprehensive configuration management in DevOps terms.
What Are The Best Software Configuration Management Tools?
Here are twelve of the top configuration management software tools on offer today.
Although no tool may fit all situations strictly, one may come out on top for your situation.
Alibaba Application Configuration Management
Alibaba, commonly called an Application Configuration Management solution (ACM), allows you to centralize application configuration management (ACM).
This improves service capabilities across Big Data, DevOps and Microservices platforms. Alibaba features a multi-level caching system, which guarantees 99.99 per cent availability of servers at cost plans with paid plans available.
Ansible Configuration tool
Ansible is considered by many to be the premier configuration management software. Ansible's powerful automation feature enables IT professionals to bypass mundane administrative work and focus on more challenging development activities, such as cloud provisioning or intra-service orchestration automation tasks.
Ansible Tower allows you also to oversee all aspects of IT infrastructure management - this trial version and paid plans available are both great ways of getting the most out of Ansible. Cost: Trial version as well as paid subscription plans available
Chef Configuration Tool
Chef is software enabling computer administrators to easily configure files and programs on computers running cloud-based virtual machines and servers through an automation platform called Chef Server.
It serves as an ideal method for configuring and maintaining infrastructure; creating code using the Chef setup machine keeps everything compliant; each recipe saved is an individual cookbook; each task considered one, and Chef makes increasing resilience while producing bug-free programs easier with its ease of use - cost: Paid Plan.
Cfengine Configuration Tool
Automation tools automate software management and deployment in IT operational environments, such as servers or embedded networks.
Automation is ideal for configuring and maintaining large computer systems or servers as well as laptops, mobile phones or any other technology device - plus its cost is open-source.
ConfigHub
ConfigHub is an IT team management tool used for centralized configuration management of software across an entire stack and one application or whole system.
Software configurations are stored, managed, and distributed by developers for storage or deployment to apps or complete systems via developers themselves. ConfigHub excels at modeling dynamic system topologies, eliminating configuration mistakes or duplicative configurations, and centralizing all configuration controls in one convenient place - a free, open-source version is also available.
JUJU
Juju is designed to reduce operating overhead for new applications and software. You can configure, scale and deploy cloud-based apps using OpenStack containers and physical servers; Juju provides controller, dashboard and DNS; supports multi-node deployment with Transport Layer Security between nodes; cost is open-source based.
Puppet Configuration tool
Puppet excels at centralizing and automating configuration management processes, primarily configuring services and applications across many different services and applications.
Model-driven management enables users to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure quickly while making quick changes when necessary or responding quickly to urgent issues arising.
Puppet works across platforms, including Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, RHEL, and Solaris Windows OS. Furthermore, it's user-friendly as it supports an active community.
Trial plans are available as well. Cost varies per plan, with many more features offered over paid programs offered by companies.
RackHD
RackHD, an application programming interface (API)-based tool for hardware orchestration and management that is platform independent, automates many management tasks like installing and updating firmware, creating features requests, provisioning operating systems for servers, providing raw data telemetry or providing data feeds - cost: Open-source.
Rudder
The rudder is an open-source web server-side role-based interface written in Scala that serves web pages on servers running Microsoft Azure Web Apps (EaaS).
Rudder helps production infrastructures use C for automated maintenance tasks as an automatic maintenance tool to monitor software and hardware inventories and host policies, node management, and policy definition within your environment. Cost: Open-source.
SaltStack
SaltStack, written in Python, can be configured with either a master client or a non-centralized setup for IT automation and remote task execution in specified states.
Furthermore, SaltStack uses infrastructure-as-code to automate network deployment, vulnerability management and configuration management while seamlessly integrating into cloud services like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or AWS (Amazon Web Services). Price: Plans must be purchased to use SaltStack effectively.
The Server Configuration Monitoring Tool
Server Configuration Monitor compares changes to configurations of servers, databases and applications over time, providing real-time design of both services and apps by users.
IT teams utilize Server Configuration Monitor as part of their monitoring of output changes as well as server hardware/software/alert changes/deviations alerts/ reports on departures - providing reports as variations occur - at no charge over a 30-day trial or paid plans (with free problems available to individuals).
Vagrant
Vagrant is a multi-platform app designed to create and manage virtual machines through one process quickly. Compatible with VMs such as VMware VirtualBox Hyper-V, Vagrant is one of the quickest and easiest methods available today for creating virtual machines.
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Automation Of Configuration Management
Automation of large-scale configuration management is vital to creating a consistent and reliable IT environment.
Automation enables teams to deploy infrastructure components faster with reduced human errors - this ensures consistent settings are preserved across data centers, clouds, and edge environments over their lifecycle reducing security issues and performance concerns. Automating IT processes can reduce IT costs, complexity and errors:
- Infrastructure Automation: Configure and manage server infrastructure Automation to ensure consistency and eliminate configuration drift.
- Cloud Automation: Configure and manage cloud resources, including operating systems and security groups.
- Automation of network devices: Configure and manage networks such as routers and switches.
- Security Automation: Configure and manage security devices, such as firewalls or intrusion detection systems - and apply consistent policies to network access.
- Edge Automation: Configure and manage remote infrastructure, including network, IoT, IoT devices, and server equipment.
Why Automate?
Automation Platform can assist your company with speed, orchestration and innovation through automation. Manage policies and governance effectively across teams while scaling automation as your company expands.
Ansible Automation Platform offers all of the tools necessary for enterprise-wide automation, from content creation tools and Ansible Playbooks written in YAML format to analytics dashboards with rich analytics, event-driven solutions and visual dashboards - plus Red Hat, Open Source Innovation, hardened explicitly for your needs - providing all you need to increase productivity on new projects while cutting completion times significantly.
When first turning it on, do you recall the last device you bought - a phone, tablet or laptop? Once powered on, you likely explored its capabilities as you checked out some preloaded programs or got used to its design and feel.
Before disposing of your package, you likely customized its settings - uploading new wallpaper or fonts, installing notification sounds, adding favorite wallpapers/fonts etc.
Over time, your device becomes your own as you add software, apps and updates to its operating system. While this process is normal and acceptable - and may lead to you running 100 devices instead of just owning one.
Unfortunately, each user has their preference regarding how they want things done. As machines become less standardized over time, issues can range from minor inconveniences to significant setbacks.
Automated Configuration Management: Understanding
With each release, Tools introduces new technologies into its infrastructure, meeting functional requirements while adding rich new features that improve our applications' capabilities and user experiences.
Although these innovations enhance capabilities and user experiences, the additional steps necessary for setting up environments can present system administrators and development teams with challenges on an everyday basis; system administrators face the different task of dealing with numerous copies of production environments or testing environments, while application teams and team members experience these same difficulties when setting them up on an everyday basis.
It provides an automated framework for configuration management that enables you to save your settings as database templates or external templates and reuse them later, only needing to be set up once.
There are two ways Tools offers automated configuration; either through its Automated Configuration Manager interface on the PIA browser or command line - although you could also run this process using a shell script or batch files.
After installing and configuring infrastructure, such as database server(s), application server(s), Process Scheduler Server, and PIA Domain(s), using either PIA or command line, running the Configuration Tool can save both time and effort by reading stored configuration properties from templates or template files and inserting them directly into database tables - protecting yourself from time-consuming updates each time an environment is created or refreshed.
These settings correspond to those you would usually enter manually into Tools on configuration pages before saving them into the database.
Instead of manually inputting and saving an Integration Gateway URL each time on Gateways Page, its value can now be added once to your template. It will then be automatically retrieved and stored in the database by our Automated Configuration Management Framework each time that environment refreshes itself.
Templates are composed of plug-ins that define values and properties. A configuration program activates configuration plug-ins and takes properties from their plug-in before configuring associated features based on them - providing control for specific settings or areas of configuration via references in templates, template files or configuration interfaces.
Configuration management (CM) is a system engineering approach which seeks to ensure consistency between functional and physical attributes of products with their design, operating information and design decisions throughout their life cycle.
ITSM (IT Service Management), one form of configuration management implemented under ITIL standards, ensures system resources such as computers, servers, and other assets have been configured correctly - hence trustworthiness; other terms used include IT automation.
To meet its objectives, configuration management typically utilizes automation; to do this, teams frequently rely on tools like Puppet Ansible Terraform and similar configuration tools.
Automation makes it simpler and quicker to implement checks and redundant processes, decreasing human error risk while assuring assets remain in their proper states. If an engineer neglects to update software regularly, an outdated version could contain CVE vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to install malware, spread viruses, or even run ransomware attacks on computers.
Most often, these systems will come into play when managing configuration:
- Other storage and database systems
- Operating Systems
- Social Networking
- Apps
- You can also download the software.
What Is The Importance Of Configuration Management?
No doubt technology drives your business. For companies selling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), technology is at the core.
Every organization automates some part of their processes using technology; even those not selling SaaS use automation technology in some form or another to streamline business processes and automate processes using automation technology and configuring these systems correctly for optimal business results. Servers, networks, operating system configuration files, assets, IT etc., are controlled through configuration management found within most software menus.
Failing to monitor changes and configuration changes could result in system failures, breaches and information leaks.
Many businesses use Configuration Management Databases (CMDB), Plans and Managers to streamline operations while mitigating cybersecurity risks.
Version control is essential in all IT infrastructure environments, supporting project management, asset management and audit processes, and software development and debugging activities.
Versioning aids project managers as they navigate audit processes and software development/debugging activities. Configuration management provides many other advantages:
- Visibility and tracking changes in your system reduce the risk of security breaches and outages.
- Reduce costs by knowing all elements in your configuration and avoiding duplication.
- You can improve the experience of your internal and external staff and customers by quickly identifying and fixing configurations that could negatively impact performance.
- Control your processes with strict control by creating and enforcing policies and procedures that regulate asset identification, monitoring and auditing.
- You can provide better service with greater agility.
- Change management is made more accessible by having a baseline configuration and the ability to see changes in design that will avoid issues.
- Restoration of service is quicker. You can quickly restore service in an emergency because your configuration has been documented and is automated.
- It improved release management with a precise accounting of status.
DevOps has quickly taken hold throughout the United States and globally. Software configuration management (SCM) has become standard practice across all IT life cycle management phases - as demonstrated in this diagram below, however, regardless of whether DevOps is used.
When building, managing, and overseeing processes, keeping these factors in mind should help your enterprise remain agile in meeting customer demands for fast results.
Read More: What is and How Important is Software Development Automation
What Happens If You Use Something Other Than Configuration Management?
An auto mechanic from an iconic automobile dealership appears in a commercial to discuss how an expensive repair could have been avoided had an oil filter been changed earlier.
He notes that choosing not to utilize configuration management could save some short-term money, but it may cost more:
- It takes months to manually determine the system components that should be changed when there are changes in requirements.
- Implementations that fail because you need to communicate changes in your project requirements to the other parties.
- Productivity is lost by replacing system components with new, flawed versions without being able to return to an operational state quickly.
- Outages due to incorrect modifications of system components.
Configuration management has quickly become an essential practice of systems engineering due to its effectiveness.
This practice helps avoid unnecessary costs while freeing IT of firefighting duties. So the lesson here is clear - use configuration management preventively rather than react after a disaster.
What Are Some Examples Of Configuration Management?
Four pillars make up an exemplary framework for configuration management:
This Issue Is Essential
Due to a software issue, the New York Stock Exchange was temporarily inoperable for nearly 90 minutes. It could no longer process transactions for stock transactions.
Impact
Beyond the New York Stock Exchange floor, financial markets were severely disrupted. Trading stopped on American Stock Exchange, some futures markets and Options Markets as investors could no longer calculate indexes using NYSE data; investors became reluctant to trade on NASDAQ Stock Market without it.
Cause
Problems were caused by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) installation of new software. They installed software on eight trading terminals before go-live and tested it the night before launch; when eight buildings failed upon go-live on Sunday morning, they attempted to switch back over.
Still, they could only open trading sessions for a trading session.
Lessons Learned
Although this incident might appear as a failure for some observers, NYSE's configuration management system was an overwhelming success.
Their tools and processes proved highly capable; even when issues started arising shortly before trading opened, they quickly identified and addressed them before any lasting disruption took place; damage to NYSE was minimal aside from some red faces, while prolonged outages would have likely caused much more significant detriment to operations than ever seen here.
What Is The Cost Of Configuration Management?
Unfortunately, configuration management doesn't come free. First, you will have to purchase a configuration system.
IBM and Microsoft both sell commercial solutions for this process as well as open-source projects which charge per node; these tools often follow a "node-based pricing structure", with different price points depending on nodes such as servers, databases, network appliances, mobile devices and storage - however, with open source projects this pricing structure has come a long way; making a more prominent vendor less valuable overall in comparison.
The second is people. If your internal capacity is limited, this includes staff or contractors who can implement configuration management tools and processes in your company and train the current team to incorporate ongoing configuration management practices.
How Much Does Configuration Management Return On Investment?
Configuration management can provide several financial advantages that will yield a positive return on investment:
- Increase in IT staff productivity. Automating staff IT activities reduced the time they spent on "keeping lights on", allowing them to focus more resources on business initiatives.
- Increase in user productivity.
- IT Cost Reduction IT Operations Optimization reduces costs in multiple areas, Including Infrastructure, Outsourced Services, and Management Software.
- Delivery of IT Services. Assuring the reliability of software releases at all times.
You can use many ROI calculators to calculate the ROI of your business. Cost avoidance is the metric:
- Number of nodes/devices monitored by the configuration management system.
- It takes an engineer (at least $35/hour) to manage configuration management manually.
- If (not when) there is a system failure, no backups are configured.
- You will need to do a mass configuration update on many plans, or you may have to perform a rollout.
- If your company has to pass an assessment of technology risks or comply with a request for a configuration audit.
All of these activities benefit from configuration management. All of these activities require time and money.
What Is The Best Practice In Configuration Management?
Configuration management, data control, and management can all present potential risk, from corruption or loss to asset configuration being highly available and functionally integrated into an organization's operations.
Use these best practices to ensure your assets are configured for maximum uptime.
Track Changes
Consider changing sets when tracking configuration and system provisioning changes. Changesets (or packaged commits) allow building managers to see all files affected when assets have been updated easily; build managers can then quickly roll back unwanted changes if desired.
Early Testing
Conducting frequent and early testing makes it easy to spot bugs in configuration management and possible regressions.
Performance Testing
DevOps teams can utilize performance testing to understand how recent system modifications will alter overall performance.
Early And Often, Integration Is Critical
Integrate new features and changes early to your system to identify potential problems before they become costly in production environments.
Code Fixes: Avoid Them
More than documenting issues within your repository for configuration management could leave them clear for reviewers down the line and can even lead to code conflicts and subtle bugs being missed during reviews.
Configuration Control
Includes any requests or proposals to change or propose modifications and the subsequent approval or rejection decisions, covering every aspect of control for changes to designs, hardware, firmware, software or documentation.
At its core, these best practices for optimal computer system configuration represent only an introduction. There are more fundamental best practices than this that your team needs to codify if you wish for your organization's future success; keep an open mind as new needs emerge.
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Conclusion
The tools and Automation Processes we employ for configuration management are ever-evolving, with three primary goals of configuration management in mind.
These goals are: identifying all code deployed into production environments; retrieving all configuration items used for creating any desired work product or state or release; creating an environment in which bug fixes can be made without incurring regression due to missing header files; creating an environment which facilitates bug fixing efforts without risk of relapses due to missing files; creating an environment which enables bug fixability without impact on business results or production schedule.
Users tend to gravitate toward tools which provide significant improvements across any of the fundamental drivers of configuration management; this suggests an environment in which CM software continues to adapt and advance over time.
