Hello all,

I am looking for a software to monitor any configuration changes in the data center for Linux, windows, or both. We have a mixture of windows 2003 and 2008 servers and redhat linux servers (primarily centos). I would prefer to have it server based with agents to install so I can monitor from a single machine but i'm open for suggestions. This is what I am looking for in the software and any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

1. install software on new and previously configured machines

2. set the "base" configuration

3. monitor the configurations for any changes

4. (optional) some sort of notification for any changes made to those "base" configurations (email would be cool but isn't necessary)

Thanks again for any help!

Don't have any software in mind that works for Windows, but I'd like to
suggest a different approach (for at least the Linux systems).

Rather than monitoring configuration on the servers have the config in
a centralised repo, and disallow/disable changes on the servers themselves.
At least that way you'll have time, date, person and actual change handy,
and do a targeted fix if a change breaks something. After all, the monitoring
may get broken/disabled if a change affects machine behaviour or networking,
and your agents don't do their job any more.

Just my 2cents ...

And for the approach I mentioned you could look at things like puppet ...


Cheers,
Tink

Thats actually a great idea. thank you. Do you think something like subversion would work? cause i have a little bit of experience with that.

It certainly should, the problem is that you don't have an
easy interface to push the changes - with a bigger number of
machines this would become quite manually involved ... puppet
can be made to use svn for it's config store.


Cheers,
Tink