Configuration Management Tools

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Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service

Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service (IIS) is an infrastructure lifecycle management solution that helps IT operations teams manage their compute, storage, and networking infrastructure—wherever it is—all from one place. Designed for Cisco UCS and HyperFlex customers, Cisco…

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(1-25 of 64)

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments…

2
Microsoft Intune

Microsoft Intune (formerly Microsoft Endpoint Manager), combining the capabilities of the former Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, SCCM or ConfigMgr, is presented as a unified endpoint management option. Microsoft Intune is an endpoint management solution for mobile…

3
HashiCorp Terraform

Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team…

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4
Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service

Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service (IIS) is an infrastructure lifecycle management solution that helps IT operations teams manage their compute, storage, and networking infrastructure—wherever it is—all from one place. Designed for Cisco UCS and HyperFlex customers, Cisco…

5
Microsoft System Center

Microsoft System Center Suite is a family of IT management software for network monitoring, updating and patching, endpoint protection with anti-malware, data protection and backup, ITIL- structured IT service management, remote administration and more. It is available in two editions:…

6
Progress Chef

Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly,…

7
TeamCity

TeamCity is a continuous integration server from Czeck company JetBrains.

8
HashiCorp Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool designed to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. It leverages a declarative configuration file which describes all software requirements, packages, operating system configuration, and users.

9
Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enteprise is an IT automation and configuration management solution that enables users to manage and automate infrastructure and complex workflows. The vendor states Puppet Enterprise combines both model‑based and task-based capabilities in a way that enables organizations…

10
SUSE Manager

German company SUSE offers SUSE Manager, a software defined infrastructure Linux server configuration management tool supporting patching, provisioning of Linux servers, and related actions.

11
Salt Project

Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired…

12
AWS Config

Amazon Web Services offers AWS Config, a service that provides monitoring and assessment of AWS resource configurations to support compliance auditing, change management and troubleshooting, with resource histories and comparison of historical configurations against planned configurations.…

13
AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and…

14
HashiCorp Consul

HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.

15
HCL BigFix

BigFix, now supported by HCL Technologies since the acquisition of BigFix from IBM in 2018, is an endpoint management solution providing endpoint visibility and IT asset discovery, automated endpoint patching (BigFix Lifecycle and BigFix Patch) policy enforcement (BigFix Compliance)…

16
OpenText AccuRev

AccuRev, a software configuration management offering, is now owned and supported by Micro Focus since the December 2013 acquisition, and now by OpenText.

17
Tanium

Tanium, headquartered in Emeryville, provides two solution packages: Unified Endpoint Management and Unified Endpoint Security. The vendor states this approach reduces complexity, improves efficiency and closes the gaps between operations and security. Tanium can also be delivered…

18
AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.

19
IBM DevOps Code ClearCase

An enterprise-grade configuration management system that provides controlled access to software assets.

20
OpenText ZENworks Configuration Management

OpenTextâ„¢ ZENworks Configuration Management, formerly from Micro Focus and earlier from Novell, helps users manage both devices and software across the entire IT environment. A single, unified web console provides insight to both devices and software, improves visibility, and helps…

21
Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces uses Kubernetes and containers to provide any member of the development or IT team with a consistent, secure, and zero-configuration development environment. It is the next stage of the former Codenvy.io, owned and supported by Red Hat since the May…

22
openSUSE YaST

YaST is an installation and configuration tool for openSUSE and the SUSE Enterprise Linux Distribution, an open source tool and project supported by German company SUSE.

23
Quali CloudShell

CloudShell, from Quali headquartered in Austin, is an infrastructure automation solution for cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments.

24
TrueSight Automation for Servers

BMC's TrueSight Automation for Servers (formerly under the BladeLogic Automation Suite) is a server lifecycle automation application supporting configuration, patching and maintaining physical, cloud and virtual servers.

25
Siemens Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) Portal

Totally Integrated Automation Portal (TIA Portal) from Siemens is an automation engineering framework that gives users unrestricted access to the complete range of digitalized automation services, from digital planning to integrated engineering and transparent operation. The vendor…

Configuration Management Tools TrustMap

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Learn More About Configuration Management Tools

What are Configuration Management Tools?

Configuration Management is a subset of systems management. 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. These tools are invaluable for understanding the impact of changing one configuration item on all the others. Configuration management data is usually stored in a configuration management database.

Configuration Management Tools Features & Capabilities

  • Infrastructure automation
  • Automated provisioning
  • Application deployment
  • Task management
  • Visualization and reporting
  • Orchestration
  • Node management
  • Role-based access control

Configuration Management vs. Workload Automation

Configuration management software is one of a constellation of DevOps categories designed to facilitate cooperation between IT and Development.

Configuration management software is designed to automate the deployment of applications in the data center and in the cloud. This is related to the older workload automation category of software. Workload automation is still used by many organizations to handle event-based scheduling and resource management across applications, databases, and architectures.

Configuration Management Benefits

The purpose of configuration management is really to keep a detailed record of the information about the computer system and updating them as needed. This includes listing all of 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 main 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

Configuration Management Comparison

When considering Configuration Management options, consider the following aspects of each product offering.

  1. Scripting language: Most configuration management tools provide a scripting language for creating logic for automation. When purchasing a configuration management tool, you should consider how difficult each option's scripting language is, and how similar it is to what your developers already know.
  2. Ease of use: Some configuration management tools are built to be usable by inexperienced users, but most offer complexities such as advanced scripting languages. Consider what the capabilities of your organization are when purchasing a configuration management tool.
  3. Deployment Environment: Configuration management tools don’t all support all deployment environments, or in some cases specialize in some environments with limited support for others. When choosing a configuration management tool, be sure to pick one that can support your deployment environment, and ideally specializes in it.

Pricing Information

Several of the leading tools in this category are open-source, but even if the software is free, successful usage will require experienced teams with knowledge of unit and integration testing, version control and other development concepts.

Many of these open-source platforms also have commercial products with additional features designed with enterprises in mind. These products are usually sold by a physical device or network node. Typical pricing is over $100 per node, but product packaging differs from one vendor to another making direct price comparison more difficult.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key benefits of configuration management tools?

Configuration management tools provide disaster recovery for the applications and resources they are managing, as well as help reduce downtime for those resources. Additionally, Configuration management tools make it easy to provision resources to applications, which makes scaling more manageable as businesses can see and allocate resources with a single tool.

What are the best configuration management tools?

The highest rated configuration management tools are as follows

  1. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
  2. Ansible
  3. Bamboo


Are there free or open source configuration management tools?

In addition to proprietary configuration tools, there are also many open source solutions that businesses can implement and use for free. One of the most popular configuration management tools, Ansible, is an open source tool.

What businesses can benefit most from a configuration management tool?

Configuration management tools are most popular with larger enterprises that are more likely to have a complex IT infrastructure. Despite this, a configuration management tool can save time and automate processes for any business with a multitude of resources and applications to manage.