Enterprise Management Associates Analyst Steve Brasen made some good points in his post yesterday on the importance of Systems Change and Configuration Management for bringing clarity to managing an IT infrastructure.
Here are some key statements from Brasen:
- The sheer magnitude of system, network and application configuration files and settings makes even a cursory review impractical, if not impossible.
- Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has determined that, on average, over 60% of critical system and application outages are caused by faulty changes to the environment.
- Automated change and configuration management (CCM) tools provide IT managers with a simple interface for determining the health of the IT infrastructure, and administrators a valuable tool for quickly identifying failures and potential problems.
In his post, Brasen does a good job of describing the configuration complexities responsible for the lack of clarity in most enterprises.
At the core of the problem is the massive amount of configuration data inherent in an IT support stack. Consider the number of settings found in configuration files for the operating system, networking, security, databases, applications, and a myriad of other resources and tools necessary to support business requirements on a single server – then multiply this by the number of servers in an IT infrastructure. Further, each of the individual configuration elements needs to be set specifically for the environment and use for which it is intended. Even default setting are unreliable as vendors intend these for only the broadest of uses, so customization is necessary to ensure viability to a particular utilization. Researching how best to set configuration settings is often difficult and extremely time consuming.
While Brasen doesn't call it our specifically, the key to investing in a CCM tool is to ensure that it collects from the broadest possible cross-section of your infrastructure and in the appropriate level of detail to really provide the answers you're going to need to maintain service availability, provide validation of appropriate controls around configuration information for audits, and reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities associated with configuration.
In almost every case, you won't get those answers from a vendor's typical marketing propaganda. You'll need to take the time to truly dig into the product itself.
Contributed by Mark Tordoff
Comments