Top 5 tools for configuration management every ITOps team should know

According to the Uptime Institute, over 60% of IT outages result in losses exceeding $100,000, underscoring the financial risks associated with poor IT configuration management.¹

You know your savior here is configuration management software. But precisely which? The market is full of options. That's why it becomes important to invest in configuration management software that meets your precise needs.

We've done the research to give you a list of the top five configuration management tools that can help streamline your IT operations and mitigate risks. Let's check it out after going through some fundamentals.

What are configuration management tools?

Configuration management tools are specialized software that automate the tracking, managing, and maintaining of IT assets and their configurations. These tools allow your IT teams to record configuration items (CIs), monitor changes to your IT assets, and ensure compliance with internal and external standards—simplifying the management of complex IT ecosystems.

Such a system helps you maintain standard configurations across systems, which comes in handy when something gets misconfigured.

For example, suppose a critical server configuration is accidentally changed (due to an update or a system glitch). In that case, configuration management tools can quickly detect the issue, roll it back to its last stable state, and prevent potential downtime.

Moreover, it:

• Ensures all systems adhere to predefined configurations, reducing the risk of discrepancies.

• Helps maintain compliance with regulatory standards by tracking configuration changes.

• Automates repetitive tasks, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

• Minimizes errors caused by manual configurations, reducing downtime and security risks.

Did you know?

The global configuration management market is projected to grow from USD 2.96 billion in 2024 to USD 9.22 billion by 2032! This explosive growth shows how vital configuration management is for businesses worldwide. Investing in the right configuration management tool will help you avoid potential risks and keep your systems secure and efficient as IT environments become more complex.

Invest in Freshservice—the powerful configuration management tool that allows detailed AI-powered insights, maintains asset visibility, and does more.

Why can't you do without configuration management tools?

Even minor configuration errors in your IT infrastructure can lead to major problems—downtime, system outages, and revenue loss. In fact, the Red Hat State of Kubernetes Security report identifies system misconfigurations as a primary cause of security incidents in containerized or Kubernetes-orchestrated environments.

That's where a configuration management tool saves the day. How?

1. Ensures consistency and standardization

When your IT environment is reliable, your team can focus more on innovation and less on firefighting.

The right configuration management tool helps you keep things uniform across development, testing, and production environments.

This way, it reduces discrepancies and prevents frustrating deployment failures.

2. Helps with faster incident resolution

When IT problems occur, solving issues quickly is key to keeping your services running smoothly and your customers happy.

With configuration management database software maintaining a detailed history of changes, you can easily track down and roll back problematic configurations, thereby minimizing downtime and getting things back on track fast.

3. Offers enhanced security and compliance

Consistent security configurations reduce vulnerabilities and ensure compliance is a continuous process, not a one-time task.

Automated configuration management consistently enforces security policies, reducing vulnerabilities and making compliance easier.

Plus, it generates detailed audit trails and compliance reports so you’re always prepared for an audit.

4. Leads to greater efficiency and cost savings

Efficiency is about aligning IT efforts with business goals to drive innovation and growth. Automation reduces manual workloads for IT teams, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks and cutting operational costs.

What role do configuration management tools play in ITOps?

Configuration management tools automate the deployment and maintenance of system configurations across servers, environments, and applications. The goal is to ensure that every component remains in a known, desired state. As a result, it reduces the risk of configuration drift, a common source of outages and security vulnerabilities, while streamlining change management processes.

As infrastructure scales and environments grow more complex, configuration management tools become essential for enforcing compliance, accelerating incident response, and supporting DevOps practices through infrastructure as code. Ultimately, they transform manual, error-prone tasks into repeatable, reliable operations that drive operational stability and agility.

Choosing a configuration management tool in 2025

Selecting the right tool requires evaluating factors like scalability, ease of use, automation capabilities, and integration options. In 2025, the focus is on AI-driven insights, cloud compatibility, and comprehensive analytics. Below, we dive into the top 5 configuration management tools that meet these criteria.

1. Ansible

Ansible is an open-source IT infrastructure automation tool that enables application deployment, orchestration, and configuration management.

Key features

• Agentless architecture: Uses SSH for communication, eliminating the need for agent installation on target nodes

• Playbook-based automation: Uses simple YAML syntax to define configuration tasks in human-readable playbooks

• Extensible modules: Offers a vast library of built-in modules and supports custom modules for flexibility

Pros

• Easy to learn and use, especially for teams with basic scripting knowledge

• Agentless design simplifies setup and reduces overhead

• Large community with extensive documentation and support

Cons

• Performance can lag with large-scale deployments due to its serial task execution by default

• Lacks built-in state tracking, making it less ideal for complex dependency management compared to other tools like Terraform

2. Hashicorp Terraform

Hashicorp Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool used for configuration management across cloud platforms.

Key features

• Multi-cloud support: Manages configurations on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Enables consistent configurations through declarative scripts

• State management: Tracks and manages infrastructure state efficiently

Pros

• Platform-agnostic and scalable

• Strong community and plugin ecosystem

Cons

• Requires knowledge of HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)

• Can struggle with state file management, especially in collaborative environments, leading to potential conflicts or complexity

3. Git

Git is a distributed version control system that also supports configuration management through infrastructure as code (IaC).

Git makes managing code changes a lot easier, especially for complex projects. By storing your configuration management data alongside your code in a Git repository, you get a complete view of everything in one place.

Key features

• Branching and merging: In Git, branches are independent lines of development that let you work on features, bug fixes, or experiments without affecting the main code. You can create, merge, and delete branches quickly, making it easy to manage configurations and control changes before merging them into the main line.

• Role-based codelines: You can maintain separate branches for production, testing, and development. This helps keep configuration settings consistent and reduces the risk of deploying unstable configurations.

• Version control: The software tracks every configuration change, enabling easy rollbacks and maintaining a clear history of changes across different environments.

Pros

• A CMDB software that's open source and free

• Good version control

Cons

• Requires command-line proficiency

• Branch management complexity

Pricing: Free

4. Progress Chef

Chef® Infra® or Progress Chef is another configuration management tool that uses Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate the creation, provisioning, and maintenance of your infrastructure. The Chef Workstation simplifies tasks like remote configuration, scanning, and testing software by providing a seamless local development experience. You can run it on Linux, Mac, or Windows systems.

Chef Cookbooks and Recipes help you create configuration policies efficiently. Cookbooks define resources like files, templates, and software packages, while recipes describe the desired state of systems using readable code. Chef Infra Client then automatically configures systems based on these instructions.

Key features

• Code-driven configuration: Chef allows you to define configurations and policies as code, making them testable, enforceable, and scalable through automated pipelines. This approach ensures reliability and consistency across your infrastructure.

• Automatic drift correction: It continuously monitors your systems for deviations from the desired configuration state and automatically resolves them, helping maintain compliance and security without manual intervention.

• Consistent multi-platform management: It allows you to manage diverse systems—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge—using a unified approach, simplifying infrastructure management.

Pros

• Supports various operating systems and cloud platforms

• Easy integration with cloud-based platforms

Cons

• Written in pure domain-specific Ruby language, which can be difficult for some users

• Complex documentation

Pricing: Starts at $59 per node per year for the Chef Cloud Business plan

5. Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool that simplifies how you manage and automate infrastructure at scale. It allows you to define system configurations as code, ensuring consistency and reducing manual efforts.

With Puppet, you can easily deploy applications, enforce security policies, and maintain compliance across diverse environments, making your infrastructure more reliable and manageable.

Key features

• Continuous configuration automation: Puppet continuously monitors your systems for configuration drift and automatically corrects any deviations to maintain the desired state.

• Vast library of modules: It offers more than 6000 expert-built modules that help you deploy and manage systems effortlessly using ready-made solutions for cloud infrastructure and OS configurations.

• Centralized control and auditability: It helps you track and report corrective and intentional changes through a unified interface, ensuring compliance and consistency across your infrastructure.

Pros

• A great tool to automate Linux VM builds and keep them consistent

• No major changes in code are required during upgrades

Cons

• To scale it well, you would need to learn existing "custom" approaches and most likely change the way you initially deployed Puppet and set up clients to talk to Puppet.

• Limited support for Microsoft Windows operating system

Pricing not available

Configuration management tools and CMDB

A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a foundational component (a subset) of configuration management, and is often included as a core part of configuration management tools.

• It serves as a centralized repository that tracks all configuration items (CIs) such as servers, network devices, applications, and databases, as well as the relationships between them.

• It helps ensure accuracy by maintaining an up-to-date inventory of your assets and their dependencies. This data enables better decision-making, more efficient troubleshooting, and a clearer understanding of how changes in one part of your system might affect other components.

• It works in tandem with other configuration management tools to manage automation, enforce policies, and maintain compliance.

Together, the CMDB and configuration management tools allow you to efficiently monitor and manage your entire IT ecosystem, making them complementary elements of a comprehensive strategy for system stability and growth.

In other words, CMDB is a key enabler that supports and enhances the overall process of configuration management.

Getting started with CMDB using Freshservice

Freshservice is a cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) tool designed to simplify configuration management with automated workflows and AI-powered insights. One of the standout features of Freshservice is its configuration management database (CMDB).

The CMDB helps you keep track of the current state of all your hardware and software assets and their relationships. With a clear view of your entire infrastructure, you can quickly spot potential issues and make informed decisions.

Key features

• Configuration Management Database (CMDB): Freshservice provides a centralized, multi-source CMDB for managing and tracking all your asset configurations.

Maintain full visibility of all your assets and their configurations with Freshservice

• Automation: Freshservice is built to support automation. Whether it's discovering your assets or tracking configuration changes, Freshservice lets you focus more on strategic tasks instead of manual updates.

• Stellar insights: Freshservice offers powerful 360-degree insights as well as dependency mapping to help you conduct accurate root-cause analyses and examine impact in detail

• Integration: It seamlessly integrates with popular tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Pricing: Starts at $19 per agent per month for the Starter plan

Why people love Freshservice

With over 40,000 small/mid-sized business (SMB), mid-market, and enterprise customers, Freshservice is a right-sized solution that can scale up or down to meet your business’ unique needs. As one satisfied customer puts it on G2:

"I have used many ITSM tools in the past, Remedy, Clarify, HP's ITSM behemoth tool, and all sorts of homebrew solutions, but none comes close to the clean and simple web-based approach of this product. Initial set up and configuration is quick and easy, and ongoing configuration change and user maintenance is straightforward. We can all see exactly what we're doing, ticket portability between workspaces is simple and transparent, and we have no issues. FreshService hss just become a part of the furniture for our Infrastructure team management, and now many other teams, as we are rolling out to the whole business."

Transform your IT operations with Freshservice

As your organization scales and adopts multi-cloud or hybrid strategies, managing configurations effectively becomes essential for staying agile and in control.

This is why choosing the right configuration management tool is essential.

Among the top contenders, Freshservice stands out with its intuitive interface, powerful automation, and seamless integration capabilities. Whether you’re looking to enhance incident resolution, secure configurations, or improve efficiency, Freshservice offers a comprehensive platform to manage IT assets effortlessly.

Start your journey with Freshservice today.