What is configuration management?

Configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering process that establishes and maintains consistency of a product’s performance, physical, and functional attributes with its design, requirements, and operational information throughout its life. Initially developed for the US military, CM, now widely used across various system types, identifies the need for patches, updates, or reconfiguration to conform systems to desired states, for example, maintaining hardware and software systems. This form of IT service management (ITSM), often called IT automation as defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), ensures that system resources, computer servers, computer systems, and other assets are known and trusted.

Configuration management works with various systems, but most often, it applies to:

• servers;
• operating systems;
• networking;
• databases and other storage systems;
• applications;
• software.

Manually performing these tasks can be too complex in larger systems. When software configuration management involves hundreds or thousands of components per application, not having proper documentation becomes a problem, with a risk of losing track of which systems require attention, the steps for solving problems, which tasks to prioritize, and whether changes are necessary throughout the system. Using configuration management tools, like automation, makes it easier to create system checks and redundancies, reduces the risk of human error, and improves the accuracy and efficiency of keeping assets in the desired state.

For example, without automation, you risk missing software updates. This can leave your systems with an outdated version with a known vulnerability listed on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), leading to computer worms, ransomware, or other types of malware.

Why is configuration management important?

Configuration management helps build robust, stable systems using tools that automatically monitor and manage updates to configuration data. Because CM prevents undocumented changes from occurring in the system, organizations avoid inconsistencies and performance and compliance issues that can lead to regulatory penalties and fines. Undocumented changes can lead to system instability, downtime, or total failure when left unnoticed. A configuration management system enables companies to define consistent settings and build and maintain them according to the organization’s established baselines. A thorough CM process includes various tools that:

• enable management and classification of systems in groups;
• automatically push changes to all affected systems to automate patches and updates;
• perform centralized modifications to baseline configurations;
• identify underperforming or non-compliant configurations;
• automate the prioritization of necessary actions;
• apply remediation when necessary.

As companies adopt a microservices architecture built on code segments of different sizes connected by various APIs, a consistent configuration management process becomes more crucial. Consistency is key for each service that uses metadata to encode specs for resource allocation, such as passwords and endpoints that define connections to other services for initialization and registration. A CM plan offers a single version of truth for desired states across an organization by enabling visibility into configuration modifications, providing audit trails, and tracking all system changes. For example, every service in microservice architecture uses configuration metadata to initialize and register itself. A few examples of software configuration metadata include:

• secrets like encryption keys and passwords;
• computational hardware resource allocation specifications for CPU and RAM;
• endpoints specifying external connections to other databases, services, or domains.

These configuration values can easily become an afterthought, leading to disorganization and scattered information. Configuration management eliminates the problem by creating a “single version of truth” with a central location for configuration. Git, a popular platform for managing configuration data, relocates information into a Git repository, enabling version control and the repository to act as your source of truth. Version control also helps with other configuration issues, such as unexpected breaking changes, that you can manage through code reviews to minimize downtime.

How does configuration management work?

Managing data carefully and keeping track of changes ensures traceability; otherwise, you risk data breaches, system outages, and data leaks. You can improve operations and reduce cybersecurity risk by employing a configuration manager, a configuration management database (CMDB), and a configuration management plan to ensure successful configuration management.

Identify your data

CM begins with gathering configuration data from all applications and network topology, including developing, staging, and producing all services and components in use and private information, such as passwords and keys that require secure encryption and storage. Once collected, load your configuration data into files that become a singular storage location for all data within your organization. Named the central repository of the desired state, this becomes the single version of the truth and provides significant benefits to collaboration, consistency, and visibility within data management.

Establish a baseline

Once you’ve aggregated and organized your configuration data, you can establish a baseline to perform intended operations without errors or bugs. Determine your baseline by identifying and reviewing the configuration of working production environments and storing the configuration settings as a baseline.

Adopt a version control system

After establishing a baseline, adopt a version control system. An alternative to version control is installing Git, initializing a repository for your project, ensuring all secret data like keys or passwords have encryption with an external key, and adding your configuration data files to the repository. If you accidentally commit unencrypted data to your repository, scrub it from the repository history to avoid exploitation risk.

Enable collaboration and transparency

Organizing and adding your configuration data to a repository encourages collaboration and full transparency in your system’s configuration. Software teams use pull request workflows to review and edit code, apply changes to configuration data files, and build an audit and accounting system that ensures accountability and visibility by having stakeholders review and accept all configuration changes.

What are the benefits of configuration management?

Configuration is the glue that holds your networks, servers, operating systems, configuration files, IT assets, data centres, and all other configuration items together. Open the settings menu of an application and you have configuration management. Audit processes, project and asset management, and software development and debugging are all beneficial components of configuration management. Other benefits include:

• Cost reduction: Having detailed information on all your configuration elements avoids wasteful duplication of technological assets.
• Improved experiences: Quickly detecting and correcting improper configurations negatively impacting performance improves customer and employee experiences.
• Efficient change management: Knowing your baseline configuration gives you visibility into designing changes to avoid problems.
• Quicker service restoration: Documenting and automating your configuration enables you to recover your services more quickly during a disruption.
• Reduced risk: Full transparency paired with tracking system changes reduces the risk of security breaches and outages.
• Greater agility: Faster problem resolution enhances your quality of service and reduces software engineering costs.
• Strict process control: Defining and enforcing policies and procedures that govern status monitoring, auditing, and asset identification provides better control of your operations.

Are organizations not using configuration management at risk?

When organizations improperly use or skip using configuration management altogether, they put themselves at risk for errors and downtime caused by wrongly configured software or hardware, leading to negative impacts like:

• unplanned downtime;
• additional expenses;
• countless hours wasted on quality issues, remediating errors, and missed deadlines.

Automating CM keeps your organization proactive and fully functional while allowing your IT department to focus on more productive work. Without configuration management, it can be challenging to understand how even the smallest changes can significantly impact operations during the development, testing, and production stages. When you don’t comprehend all the components that make a system run successfully, it’s equally difficult to determine how each parameter, service, and hardware piece contributes to the system. Configuration management also makes root cause analysis, amendments, and service level agreement (SLA) maintenance easier. Without it, organizations typically struggle with:

• determining if changes were authorized or rogue;
• seeing how changes impact the organization overall;
• quickly identifying security issues caused by unauthorized configuration changes.

A CM system helps avoid problems with improperly configured hardware and software systems. Tracking configuration changes is a proactive approach that helps avoid costly remediation projects in the future.