Configuration management processes (CM) ensures everything on your network complies with your configuration and security policies. Old approaches were often manual, resulting in a decentralized list of data, rules, and practices. While this worked for smaller companies with fewer assets, as IT systems grew and became more complex, manual approaches to configuration management became less effective.
Modern configuration tools centralize your IT team’s documentation and help them work quickly to triage and prioritize their work and play a critical role in the DevOps lifecycle. They help your team configure, monitor, and enforce the desired configurations on your network with ease.
What Is Configuration Management?
Configuration management is a process that helps teams establish and maintain a product’s performance, function, and design throughout its lifecycle. It gives employees the visibility and control they need to ensure the product works as intended and that there’s enough shared documentation so employees can support the product until it’s retired.
Though configuration management is commonly used in the military, it’s also used in civil and industrial engineering, as well as information technology (IT). In IT, configuration management is used to track, update, and maintain individual configurations (like endpoints, servers, or software) to ensure they work as expected throughout their lifecycles. It also helps enforce security policies and settings to help keep your network safe.
This is critical because in IT and systems management, internal system components (like software and operating systems) are updated and reconfigured throughout their lifecycles to ensure optimal performance. Tracking and documenting these configuration changes leaves nothing to chance and helps the team understand what change was made, why it was made, and how it impacted the system.
How Does Configuration Management Work?
In the simplest terms, configuration management is the centralization of all the information your IT system needs to operate.
Configuration management tools gather data and information (like hardware settings, API keys, etc.) across your system and store it in a configuration management database. Using the database as a guide, the team builds baseline configuration files that documents the optimal settings and configurations for all network devices.
Configuration changes to operating system updates or security settings are tracked using a version control system and maintained in a central repository (like GitHub). If something negatively impacts how the system performs, it’s easier to revert to a version that did work.
Why Is Configuration Management Important?
IT teams manage a complex and interconnected system that includes:
- Applications
- Systems
- Endpoints
- Cloud storage
- Networks
- Servers
- Edge devices
While the initial setup of these systems is fine-tuned to achieve optimal performance, maintaining these configurations can become an afterthought, which leads to configuration drift. Though it happens slowly, as systems drift away from the desired configuration, they can create problems with reliability, security, compliance, and operational efficiency.
A configuration management system ensures there’s a single source of truth for everything on the network and helps teams:
- Configuration control. Most configuration management tools push the required configurations to devices when they connect to your network, reducing configuration drift and securing the network.
- Ensures stability. The baseline configuration data shows what optimal performance looks like and helps the team maintain that stability and performance.
- Improves collaboration. Centralizing and tracking all the documentation in one place helps the IT team work together. With all the projects and information in one place, everyone has visibility and insight into what every team member is working on and how it impacts the larger team.
- Increases response time. Centralized documentation and information also allow the team to respond quickly. When multiple users can access the same information, anyone can make changes, updates, or remediations as necessary.
Implementing Configuration Management
Implementing a configuration management system improves the operational efficiency and responsiveness of your IT team, helping them track and prioritize updates as well as ensuring all changes are validated before they’re deployed.
For example, version control gives the team a checkpoint to roll back changes if something impacts baseline performance despite QA testing, allowing the team to quickly restore baseline performance. Documenting and storing every change and update in a central repository helps the team quickly track down and remediate issues that went unnoticed.
Evaluate your team’s needs and how extensive the network is. For example, larger teams may need a more robust tracking or validation process than smaller teams.
At a minimum, your configuration management tool should allow the team to:
- Make centralized modifications and updates
- Automatically prioritize and push patches
- Proactively monitor the system to identify potential problems
- Provide easy access and visibility into the baseline configuration data, changes, and version control
Get Organized
Identify and gather all the data and information from every environment your company uses. A configuration management tool can handle most of the work, but you may still need to talk to staff to identify any systems or tools people are using that IT may not know about.
Secret data, like passwords, are part of this information gathering but should be encrypted.
Establish a Baseline
Add all the configuration data to the configuration management database so the team can:
- See where the system currently stands
- Identify what the optimal configuration is
- Track and identify which changes improved or degraded performance
Track and Control Changes
A critical part of your configuration management requirements includes change control and acceptance.
Requiring all updates and changes to be reviewed before it’s committed helps root out bugs that may have been missed and reduces the possibility an update or patch has to be rolled back. This extra layer of visibility and accountability helps teams track and trace issues and ensures whatever is deployed is compatible with the current configuration.
Automating Configuration Management
One additional thing to look for in a configuration management tool is the ability to automate your configuration management processes. Automation allows the IT team to deploy changes and patches quickly and at scale and is less likely to introduce manual errors.
Automated configuration management also reduces the likelihood of configuration drift. When anything connects to the network, the configuration management tool can scan the device and push the correct configuration to ensure compliance with the current policies.
Getting Started with Configuration Management How We Help
Configuration management is something IT teams use today to prevent tomorrow’s problems. It allows the team to share resources and collaborate efficiently to increase productivity, make incremental changes that don’t negatively impact system performance, and rapidly configure resources.
Adaptiva’s automated solutions allow your team to rapidly deliver content to your endpoints, ensuring they comply with your current configuration policies. Learn how our tools can help your team work efficiently and effectively.
