Configuration Management

Configuration Management Best Practices

Software changes rapidly. Configuration management best practices allow organizations to keep track of changes in a way that allows for quick feature updates without any service disruptions. However, getting this right requires a plan.

We’ve put together best practices about multiple aspects of configuration management so your organization can best address your specific needs and processes.

What is Configuration Management?

Configuration management is the process used for establishing and maintaining a product or application’s consistency throughout its lifecycle, including processes like source code management and server provisioning. Successful configuration management systems keep processes consistent, repeatable, correct, and current. Combined with automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management offers organizations a powerful means to increase software reliability and increase release cadences. What are the Advantages of Configuration Management?

There are several benefits to adopting configuration management in the workplace:

• Predictable control of processes: By defining and enforcing formal policies and procedures, organizations gain control over asset identification, status monitoring, and auditing.
• Reduced risk: By tracking and monitoring changes to the system, there is increased visibility into the system, which will reduce risk of outages and security breaches.
• Improved customer experience: When IT can identify and respond to configuration issues quicker, customers are less likely to experience negative impacts.
• Cost reduction: By having in-depth knowledge of all aspects of a configuration, wasteful duplication will not happen, thus cutting costs.
• Quicker storage restoration Since configuration is automated and documented, outages will last less time as recovery happens quicker.

Configuration management also requires monitoring server provisioning for accuracy and consistency. Several tools exist to help organizations detect this “configuration drift.” For example, Inedo’s Otter helps organizations provision their servers and manage configuration automatically, without ever needing to log-in to a command prompt. Otter will continuously monitor servers for configuration changes and report when there is configuration drift. Organizations can set servers to automatically remediate drift or schedule remediation and other configuration changes as needed.