Designing a Configuration Monitoring and Reporting Environment

The Configuration Monitoring and Reporting Environment (CMRE) is a tool designed to collect and report on the many configuration details of systems within an enterprise. It is designed to gather information on systems about which initially very little is known. CMRE needs few prerequisites in order to do its job. CMRE is modular, flexible and runs on many different platforms. It is written in a combination of Perl, Korn shell and PHP and uses proprietary as well as open-source software. CMRE currently collects data on thousands of UNIX and Windows systems at Deutsche Bank world wide. This paper will describe the conditions that led to the need for such a tool, its design and limitations as well as the difficulties found along the way. This paper will also touch upon our performance monitoring tool (PMRE), whose data we use to help us understand our systems environment.