Configuration management keeps you from making small or large changes that go undocumented. These misconfigurations can lead to poor performance, inconsistencies, or noncompliance and negatively impact business operations and security. When undocumented changes are made across many systems and applications, it adds to instability and downtime.

Manually identifying systems that require attention, determining remediation steps, prioritizing actions, and validating completion are too complicated to perform in large environments. But without documentation, maintenance, and a change control process, system administrators and software developers could end up not knowing what’s on a server or which software has been updated.

Configuration management systems let you consistently define system settings, as well as build and maintain those systems according to those baseline settings. Configuration management helps users and administrators know where certain services exist and what the current state of application

Although the use of configuration management typically requires more initial planning and effort than manual system administration, all but the simplest of server infrastructures will be improved by the benefits that it provides. To name a few:

Even though each CM tool has its own terms, philosophy and ecosystem, they typically share many characteristics and have similar concepts.

Below you can find the most common features present in most configuration management tools for servers: