Configuration Management Software
Many IT organizations rely on manual processes, custom scripts, and golden images to accomplish repetitive tasks. In large environments, or with multiple team members, these methods are difficult to scale, track and maintain, and can create several issues, including configuration drift, non-compliance, and decreased productivity and responsiveness.
Puppet Enterprise is IT automation software that makes it easy for systems administrators to provision, configure, and manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Puppet Enterprise enables systems administrators to:
- Increase productivity and manage 100s to 1000s of nodes
- Improve responsiveness by reducing the time it takes to deploy changes
- Eliminate configuration drift and reduce outages
What Is Configuration Management?
Configuration management is the process of standardizing resource configurations and enforcing their state across IT infrastructure in an automated yet agile manner. Configuration management is critical to the success of other IT processes, including provisioning, change management, release management, patch management, compliance and security.
Compliance and Change Management
According to Gartner, more than 40% of all mission-critical IT service outages are due to people and process errors, with a significant number of those due to a lack of coordination between change, release and configuration management. In IT organizations, change management policy is the law, while configuration management automation is the enforcer. Change management policies are ineffective without a means to enforce and audit them.
Puppet Enterprise enables systems administrators to enforce change management policies by establishing a desired state baseline and then automatically monitoring changes against that baseline. Unauthorized changes can be accepted or rejected, and all changes roll up to a single report that summarizes the state of the infrastructure.
Configuration Management and Security
Configuration management is a best practice in any security plan. Configuration management can help you:
- Enforce Standard Operating Environment (SOE) standards by eliminating configuration drift
- Support vulnerability management requirements by quickly identifying resources that need to be patched and then distributing patches
- Satisfy auditing requirements by providing a complete audit trail
Configuration Management Plan and Process
As configuration management undergirds each stage of the infrastructure lifecycle, from provisioning to on-going maintenance to repurposing, developing a plan and process which deliver both configuration consistency and flexibility is key. And in order to scale the number of servers, team members, and applications, automation becomes critical aspect of the plan.
By incorporating Puppet Enterprise into their configuration management plan and processes, systems administrators are taking advantage of proven technology for IT automation both on-premise and in the cloud. And with more than 250 freely downloadable, ready-to-use configurations available on Puppet Forge, Puppet Labs’ online marketplace of community-contributed configurations, systems administrators can spend more of their time automating and problem solving and less on fighting fires.