In any organization, large or small, at some point in the life cycle of a workstation or server, the problem of configuration drift is likely to arise. It is important to understand that the monitoring and, ultimately, the remediation of the desired state of the state configuration will improve the reliability of a system and increase its security and performance.

Configuration Manager allows administrators to configure baseline settings in functionality known as Compliance Settings. In previous versions of Configuration Manager, this was known as Desired Configuration Management (DCM).

In this chapter, we will explore when to use compliance settings, how to use them to monitor for regulatory compliance, and how to remediate configuration drift from within Configuration Manager. We will cover the following topics: