Features And Capabilities of Configuration Management Tools

CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
Features And Capabilities Of The Configuration Management Tools
Configuration Management assures that all hardware and software assets that a company
owns are tracked and maintained at any instance. In simple terms, it’s astate-of-the-art
inventory for the assets maintained by the management. Configuration Management can be
achieved in an environment by consolidating two fields: software pipelines and
infrastructure-as-code. Earlier deals with technology to build and test the software artifacts
and later is the management practice of provisioning the infrastructure entities through
machine readable definition files.
Various configuration management tools for managing configurations e.g., installations of
application environments exist. These tools tend to be directed at specific vendor applications
and may be specific to certain hardware and software platforms. Administrators tend to be
wary of agents and daemons that run on their systems to perform various tasks for the most
part outside of their control or knowledge. In addition, agents and daemons typically
communicate with applications running remotely on some server or servers over the network.
Configuration management tools perform various roles to ensure consistency among physical
and logical assets. These tools identify and track configuration items and document
functional dependencies. They are invaluable for understanding the impact of changing from
one configuration item to others.
Features and capabilities of the configuration management tools are listed below
 Infrastructure automation
 Automated provisioning
 Application deployment
 Task management
 Visualization and reporting
 Orchestration
 Node management

 Role-based access control
The purpose of configuration management is to keep a detailed record of the information
about the computer system and to update them as needed. This includes listing all the
installed software, the network addresses of the computers, and the configuration of different
pieces of hardware, and creating updates or ideal models that can be used to quickly update
computers or restore them to a predefined baseline.
The major benefits are:
 Reduced risk of outages and security breaches
 Cost reduction by avoiding duplication of technology assets.
 Process control through enforcing formal policies and procedures Faster problem
resolution
 Efficient change management by understanding the baseline configuration
 Quicker restoration of service
2.1 Configuration Management Tools
Following are the list of Configuration Management tools and their details
S.No TOOL DESCRIPTION
1 Microsoft SCCM is system management
software for managing large groups of
workstations running Windows or any other
Operating Systems. It is one of the top-rated
configuration management tools.

2 Ansible is one of the leading configuration
management products from Redhat and can run
on both Unix-like and Windows OS. With the
complexities uprising due to virtualization and
cloud technologies, Ansible is designed is to
provide a consistent, reliable and secure solution
to manage the environment.
3 Bamboo is a continuous integration tool
developed by Atlassian. The main purpose of
Bamboo is used to automate the release
management, creating a continuous delivery
pipeline.
4 Chef is both the company and name of the
configuration management tool. As the managed
environments grow, manual configuration and
deployment practices compromises the
operational costs. To overcome the same, Chef
ensures that configuration policy is
flexible,testable, readable and can be versioned.
5 Terraform is a tool for building and versioning
infrastructure created by HasiCorp. With the
continual changes in the configuration,
Terraform can determine the changes and
creates incremental execution plans.
6 TeamCity is a build management and
continuous integration tool from JetBrains.
Some of the other features supported by
TeamCity are technology awareness, cloud
integrations, Code Quality tracking.
7 HashiCorp provides easy workflow for
developer, operator, and designer. It leverages a