Configuration management maintains configuration items (CI) to manage and deliver an IT service. CIs are tracked in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The CMDB stores and manages system component records with their attributes such as their type, owner, version, and dependency with other components. The CMDB keeps track of whether the server is physical or virtual, if the operating system is installed with its version (Windows 2012 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.0),the owner of the server (support, marketing, or HR), and whether it has dependency on other servers such as order management, and so on.
Configuration management is different from asset management. As you learned in the previous section, asset management is much faster. It manages the entire life cycle of an asset, from planning to retirement, while CMDB is a component of asset management that stores configuration records of an individual asset. As shown in the following diagram, configuration management implements the integration and maintenance part of asset management:
Zooming in on configuration management, as shown in the preceding diagram, configuration management implements the deployment, installation, and support part of asset management. The configuration management tool can help the operations team to reduce downtime by providing readily available information on asset configuration.
Implementing effective change management helps us to understand the impact of any changes in the environment. The most popular configuration management tools are Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Bamboo, and so on. You will learn more details about them in Chapter 12, DevOps and Solution Architecture Framework.
IT management becomes easier if your workload is in a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Cloud vendors provide inbuilt tools to track and manage IT inventories and configuration in one place. For example, AWS provides services such as AWS Config, which tracks all IT inventories that spin up as a part of your AWS cloud workload, and services such as AWS Trusted Advisor, which recommends cost, performance, and security, which you can use to decide to manage your workload.
The enterprise creates a framework such as an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which implements an Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) best practice. An ITIL provides a view on how to implement ITSM.
In this section, you learned about asset management and configuration management, which is part of the ITIL framework and more relevant to operational excellence. ITSM helps organizations to run their IT operations daily. You can learn more about ITIL from its governing body AXELOS by visiting their website (https://www.axelos.com/best-practice-solutions/itil). AXELOS offers ITIL certification to develop skills in the IT service management process. As you have learned about planning, let's explore the functioning of IT operations in the next section.