Managing the configurations of middleware environments is a difficult proposition for medium and large enterprises. "Knowing what you have" enables IT managers to make decisions about future investments and retiring old assets, standardize existing assets, manage change across the enterprise, and troubleshoot performance problems related to configurations.
Most configuration management solutions today are compliant with the best practices laid out by the IT Information Library (ITIL) framework. All the assets are stored in a central repository called the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Configuration parameters such as instance parameters for a database, or start up parameters for a WebLogic application server, or port numbers for an HTTP server are stored in the CMDB. Any changes to these parameters are also tracked. It then becomes easy to audit the changes for a specific asset, compare assets to each other (for example, Managed...