Trade.Information

Product Name: Configuration Management

Product Description

Configuration Management Defined
Balancing the intricacies and complexities of the IT environment with providing higher levels of service to the organization is one of the biggest challenges facing IT executives. Many turn to best practice frameworks, such as ITIL, for some guidelines on how to align and configure the IT organization with overall business objectives and drive IT operational improvements. When analyzing performance issues, most IT operations groups focus on their change, problem, release/software distribution and asset management processes. Yet, many of these problems are actually caused by inadequate configuration management, rather than the primary operations process in question. Configuration management provides essential information and auditing support for more than 50 percent of all critical IT operational processes.

Various industry analysts, Gartner and META Group alike, define configuration management as the combination of many management disciplines -- inventory, software distribution, remote control, imaging, migration and use -- that are merged to maintain a desired state of a system. Configuration management is the process that identifies how various IT components are linked, and how they work together within the IT environment. The goal of configuration management is to ensure that authorized configuration component relationships are identified and that all changes to the environment are documented and tracked. If configuration management data is not accurate or accessible, it is difficult to optimize the deployment of IT assets, introduce changes smoothly or resolve any potential problems.

"Configuration management is really the IT organization's (ITO) version of the Hippocratic oath," says META Group analyst Dan Vogel. "To do no harm in the IT environment, the ITO needs to know about what it has and how it all fits together. The ITO needs to understand the capabilities and limitations of each item, and how that item will be impacted by changes in the environment. If an innocent-looking wire is pulled out over here, what will the result be over there?"

Configuration Management: The Virtual Convergence
Configuration management programs span a broad spectrum of an IT infrastructure -- including desktops, network, storage, server and the physical infrastructure. At a minimum, the wide choice of configuration management tools available in the market discover and track relationships between IT components -- including hardware, software and facilities. Some tools also enable changes to the components’ configuration settings; while others enable collaborative design and modeling. Although the concept of a converged configuration management tool for the entire IT infrastructure is desired, a central repository is seen more as a “virtual” configuration management database (CMDB), rather than an actual reality. The tools used today remain very domain specific because which component relationships are tracked and how the information is used depends on the task required.

Strategically, IT operations groups continue to maintain individual databases for each area of configuration management due to the amount of detailed information and specific requirements of each domain. Examples include:

• Client configuration management tools focus on configuring and deploying operations systems, patches and applications to client devices.
• Server configuration management tools focus on configuring and deploying operating system, patches, applications and content to servers.
• Network configuration management tools focus on documenting configuration files, auditing changes and deploying updates to network devices.
• Physical infrastructure configuration management tools store information on equipment, power, cooling and space within a data center and begs for a more visual representation, rather than a flat database.

No matter what domain is managed, configuration management programs overall are prerequisites to achieve success with service-level, change, problem, availability and performance management within the IT infrastructure.