A slew of vendors in the coming weeks will make their network configuration management tools available to corporate customers looking to automate the tedious and error-prone job of configuring switches, routers and other devices - and then tracking those changes.

AlterPoint, Gold Wire Technology, Opnet and Voyence each deliver products that help document, store and monitor changes to network device configurations. Network configuration management products from these vendors and competitors such as Intelliden, Rendition Networks and Tripwire promise to reduce manual errors, ensure compliance with regulatory standards and secure network devices.

"Configuration management is useful in 1,000 different ways in IT: availability, security, regulatory compliance, patch management and so on," says Glenn O'Donnell, research director with Meta Group.

For the most part, the network configuration management products today discover network devices, capture the accurate configuration, maintain an updated database of the most recent changes made to devices and store historical data on all actions taken with the devices. The information can help users more quickly provision devices, spot security holes, ensure configuration consistency across multiple devices and apply patches where needed.

The products - some software-only, some packaged on an appliance - work to automate the tasks performed by using command-line interfaces or tools from hardware vendors such as Cisco's CiscoWorks and Nortel's Optivity. Historically, the problem with using hardware vendor configuration management tools is that most enterprise networks are heterogeneous, O'Donnell says.

"Enterprise IT managers need to be able to have all that configuration information in one location and normalized to really make sense of it," he says.

AlterPoint, in its latest release of DeviceAuthority software that runs on a dedicated server (or it can be packaged as an appliance), includes two software applications developed to audit and update devices.

DeviceAuthority Audit Module keeps an up-to-date inventory of enterprise network devices, including the software and patches installed on the device. DeviceAuthority Update Module lets network engineers input a change for, say, a Cisco router, and apply that change to all Cisco routers in the network. The one-to-many feature would cut down on configuration time, prevent errors that could occur when network engineers configure multiple devices and ensure configuration consistency across the network.