Value of Configuration Management

So what is Configuration Management? Commonly seen as a partner to Asset Management, Configuration Management is the understanding and curating of data associated with how devices and constructs in your estate are configured, work together and deliver services to your consumers and customers.

Devices are commonly referred to as CIs and CIs have attributes which hold the configuration information. This information can be as simple as hostnames and ip addresses, to registry entries and certificate information all the way to installed memory and cpu installed.

In addition to physical and virtual ‘computer like’ CIs Configuration Management also cares about logical constructs such as clusters and services and their delivery and other non-physical entities. As such Configuration Management is a complex area as it requires Configuration Managers to have an appreciation for a wide scope of technologies and an understanding of what information is important.

Configuration Management is usually governed by a Configuration Management Policy which will dictate what CIs are of interest to the Configuration Management team and their tools, usually Discovery and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) governing what should be stored there and how it should be maintained including things like how frequently data should be refreshed and what attributes are interesting enough to be catalogued.

So from this you can see that Configuration Management provides the raw information about the ‘things’ in the estate that are changed and thus the basis for Change Management/Enablement to govern that change by understand what is being changed.

You can see why Configuration Management and from a tooling perspective the CMDB provide significant value to the wider IT team and the processes that rely on that information.

Configuration Management is often focussed on at the beginning of an ITIL based process rollout however it is critical for it to be successful that the process is continually reviews and policy around it refreshed for consumption by others that participate in it, whether that be data providers or data consumers.

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