Configuration management is part of the larger process of device lifecycle management - from planning and implementing, to operations, and eventual device decommissioning.

Configuration management is one of the most tedious and repetitive operations that will occur throughout the lifecycle of a device, and it is tightly integrated with organizational change management processes. The purpose of configuration management is to build consistent and repeatable processes to implement and verify changes, as well as remediate exceptions or violations found within the infrastructure.

All of this is done to ensure compliance with the best-practice configurations and any organizational or regulatory standards. Configuration management enables consistent configuration of compute, virtualization, networking and storage resources and services. Multiple facets of a company's infrastructure can benefit from these processes, as shown in the the following illustration.


The Broad Applicability of Configuration Management Infrastructures

Configuration management tools, typically, have a hierarchically-distributed structure built on a declarative approach to management. They most often implement a client-server or master-agent framework, where policies are maintained on the server, and agents ensure the policies are applied on the devices being managed.

Examples of tasks that can be automated include:

• Auto-discovery and provisioning of devices
• Granular discovery of device components
• Policy-based and role-based management of infrastructure
• Configuration, event and power management
• Availability management (redundancy)
• Inventory, operation and licensing status report
• Continuous monitoring of resource utilization and capacity
• Dynamic provisioning of device resources (such as interface, VLANs, routes, switch/port profiles)

There are numerous security-related checks that can be implemented. For example:

• Configuration and policy compliance
• Disabling clear-text access mechanisms
• VLAN and trunk management

Network automation that started at Day-0 with POAP and PXE, can be extended by tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt Stack, etc. Leveraging tools for day-to-day management, monitoring and configuration changes, IT automation with dynamic configuration management, can optimize the work of infrastructure operations teams, at the same time mitigating the risk of error-prone keyboard input.