What is Configuration Management?

Configuration Management is the discipline of making changes in a planned or systematic fashion. It is designed to formally control the integrity of your artifacts and activities.

When done right, Config Management:

• Provides stability to your IT systems
• Empowers your decision making process because you have correct and timely information at hand
• Provides confidence when making changes
• Provides standards to your organisation

Configuration Management is a key criteria in your quest for software development maturity.

Identifies Your Components

Tableaux maintains a component manifest of all the artifacts in your product. This manifest can include literally any type of component:

• Binary deployables (Java applications, C# apps, etc)
• Database components (Table schemas, Users, updates, static content, etc)
• Web content
• Configuration actions (Create a required user, group, etc)
• System actions (Bounce servers, manage load balancers, etc)
• Documentation (Control and publish your doco)
• Many others! You're only limited by your imagination

This structure helps to organise the various bits and pieces that together construct your product.

Control Deployment Access

Through Tableaux's powerful security controls, you can specify exactly who is allowed to:

• Create, modify and delete the components
• Deploy the components into varying environments

Maybe you would let developers create their components and deploy into test environments. Allow infrastructure staff to deploy the components into production. Or you may choose to allow developers to deploy all the way into production (each deployment requiring approval from a manager).

Control Approval Access

Tableaux allows you to specify exactly who is allowed to approve deployment jobs into various environments. For example:

• Approval from a technical team leader into development environments
• Approval from a test team leader into test environments (so that deployments do not occur during mid test cycle)
• Approval from a member of the Change Advisory Board and an infrastructure manager into production

Control Deployment Criteria

With Tableaux you can enforce particular criteria on deployments. For example, you can specify:

• Path a project must take to get to the product
• Any associated metadata, such as a mandatory Request For Change number for deployments into production
• Control quality of the tag names used to identify your artifacts in your SCM

Non-Repudiation of Key Actions

You can ask Tableaux to challenge users for their credentials before performing key actions, such as deploying or approving requests into sensitive environments.

Tableaux guarantees that the action was performed by that authorised user, and creates the evidence trail to prove it.

Provides Information

The deployment history in Tableaux provides a wealth of data that can be mined. This gives you a valuable source of information to answer many questions, such as:

• Report on the current state of your environment, including the latest version of everything that has deployed or changed in your production environment
• Report on all changes made to an environment between particular dates
• Report on various statistics such as success/failure ratio of deployments into production

Auditing

Every action in Tableaux us audited. When a problem occurs Tableaux helps avoid the "blame game" because the actions of all actors are plain to see. Thus you can get on with fixing problems rather than slinging accusations.