2012-09-27

Change and Configuration Management tracking software

Change and Configuration Management tracking software
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itmanager/thread/daa53e56-636b-4514-96c3-b74c24bebf06

Hi there,
I'd also like to know if there is any software can acheive this.Not sure if it'll help, but we currently do this by a manual process. Essentially, staff are trained that in order to change any configuration, they need to raise a Change Request (Word template), detailing all the details of the change. This is then passed onto the IT person responsible for actually making the change. It's assigned a unique "Change ID", and logged in an excel spreadsheet.
It's a long winded process, that relies on staff being trained to raise change requests, but the end result is that we can look back from histroy of a particular system to see all the changes that were made.
We also have a mechanism that allows for "Emergency Change Requests" that allow us to change first and raise the paperwork later. This is discouraged, but in a true emergency, allows changes to be made quickly.
Hope this helps.
James
Marked As Answer byKevin RemdeMicrosoft Employee, OwnerMonday, February 28, 2011 1:02 PM

Perhaps you could clarify further what you might expect from a system that "helps us track". If you have diligent engineers then you could track changes in a simple spreadsheet. I like to use a sharepoint discussion list for tracking changes because we can subscribe to the list and receive an email when a change occurs, while also discussing the change and maintaining that discussion in a single location. But then again, we could just setup a mailbox for change tracking and have people write an email to it when they change something.
If you don't have diligent engineers and want to find some software that actually recognizes changes, then you're faced with a very diverse set of options and there really isn't one that is good, inexpensive, and easy to use, that works across all platforms. Since this is a Microsoft Forum I'll say that Microsoft Operations Manager is pretty good. System Center Essentials is fairly inexpensive but their interface is still clunky. For "what happened" type tracking I like to use Splunk. I forward all event logs to it. If you enable auditing on registry keys then those changes land in the logs. If you're running a 2008r2 infrastructure then you can just use its built-in log forwarding for centralized log management. I'm ultimately looking towards something like Tripwire Enterprise for true automated change management.

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