Configuresoft's Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) 3.5 can make the process of collecting, tracking and managing system configurations quite a bit easier.
In many ways, ECM is the Swiss Army knife of Windows management tools. It does the job of a whole raft of other tools, including a service and local account manager, emergency repair disk manager, event-viewer consolidator, server monitor, and, of course, a configuration documenter. Unfortunately, ECM isn't as good as dedicated tools designed to perform these specific tasks, but it is still quite useful.
More Than a Corkscrew
Like most products that accumulate data from multiple systems, ECM uses an agent installed on each managed system. These agents collect the data and send it back to a central server. With other products, this approach occasionally leads to problems -- memory leaks and excessive idle processor utilization in the agents. Configuresoft managed to avoid this by building ECM's agent as a set of DCOM (Distributed Component Object Module) DLLs (dynamic link libraries) rather than as a Windows service.
When you're ready to collect data from the systems you're managing with ECM, the collector service on your ECM server polls the agents, waking up the agent DLLs as a low-priority thread running under the authority of the account you specified at setup. The collection service then saves the data in a Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 database.
ECM collects an admirable amount of information about your system, including the location of free disk space, IP configuration, installed security policies, hot fixes and event-log data. ECM can also execute commands and upload arbitrary files as part of the scheduled data-collection process, so you can collect a DMI (Desktop Management Interface) .mif file or antivirus logs, for example. You can view the data through a Windows or a Web console, and you can manage the systems through the Windows console.
Anyone who has ever had to change the login account configuration for 10 or 15 services because the password needed to be changed will find ECM's password-change wizard a godsend. Rather than having to select each service and type the new password twice for each, you can select the service account and enter a new password or have ECM generate a random one.
The wizard will update the service information automatically on all the systems in its database that use the account. If you want to change the passwords on local accounts, such as the administrator, you need only select the machines to update from a list the wizard displays. Security concerns are allayed in that you must tell ECM a domain admin level password to make it work.
101 Uses
One area where the data collection makes life a lot easier is event logs. No one looks forward to scrolling through hundreds or thousands of event-log entries searching for one significant event. Using ECM, you can set filters to include or exclude alerts from the database based on severity, alert number, source log or other factors. You then can view the events by source service, system and/or log.
Beyond configuration data, ECM also collects the files Windows NT and Windows 2000 use to create emergency repair disks and stores them in the database. When one of your systems gets a corrupted SAM (Security Account Management) or registry database, you can generate an emergency repair disk from the ECM console. This relieves quite a burden on administrators, as emergency repair disks need to be updated whenever servers' disk configuration or SAM changes. The ECM user's guide even has an example that shows how to add the rdisk command to the collection process, so the emergency repair disk data will be up to date when it's collected.
Some of the Cooler Blades
While ECM lacks the real-time functionality of a full server-monitoring tool, such as Ripple Technology's RippleTech LogCaster or Heroix Corp.'s RoboMon, it does keep track of some critical server functions, including free disk space or processes that are consuming too many CPU cycles or increasing memory and handles. ECM can generate an e-mail or SNMP alert on a service failure or file change, but since most ECM users probably will set data collection to occur once a day (the default), your users may notice a service failure before you get the page.
ECM's most powerful function is the compliance manager. Once you've collected data from your systems, you can create a package that defines the services, device drivers, local accounts, registry or other data you want to check. When you create a template, you choose a system that has the configuration you want all the other systems to match -- say, running the right hot fix or antivirus service -- and select that attribute. Each package can query only a single type of data -- for example, services or files. Unfortunately, all packages must compare other systems with an existing system. You can't create one from scratch.
You can make a template that compares the data on other selected systems to see if they are in compliance with the packages. One template can call multiple packages, so you can build one template that checks all your Microsoft Exchange servers for a registry entry and free disk space.
ECM includes a report module with many predefined reports -- really SQL queries -- to let you view your data from many angles and present it in the form of printed or HTML reports. The reporting module takes advantage of ECM's use of SQL Server as a data store, one of its strongest features. You can generate your own queries using any SQL Server-compatible tool, such as Microsoft Access or Seagate Technology's Crystal Reports, if you want custom presentations.
Jack of All Trades?
Unfortunately, ECM's wide breadth of functions comes with complexity. ECM installs no fewer than nine different applications on a control console; the general configuration application has 16 different tabbed pages of configuration options. Even in the main console application, some functions, such as the repair disk tool, are difficult to find. The documentation is a bit skimpy, consisting of a slim getting-started manual and a 100-page guide, neither one of which has an index.
Given ECM's price of $795 for server and $30 per workstation, I believe it is most useful as an administrator's primary tool in server management. Certainly administrators looking for a single integrated tool will find it substantially better than the standard Windows tools.
Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist of Networks Are Our Lives, a network design and consulting firm in Hoboken, N.J. Send comments about this article to him at hmarks@naol.com.
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