Network Change Management - Disaster struck, now what?

Do you treat network configuration management with the same care and love as you do for server backups in your environment? Or, are both equally as unattended to as the other? No, this is not a post about backups, that would be too boring right? Well, I would be willing to bet that some environments treat network configuration management as low down on the priority list as backups. Let’s start with something as simple as backing up the configuration of a network switch or router. Are you thinking, “Well now why would I ever do that”? Let’s be hopeful that you are not one of those organizations but rather one who could answer with “we backup all of our routers and switches nightly”. If you do not back up the configurations of your network devices, how would you recover in the event of a device failure? Hopefully not stuck trying to remember what the configuration was and having to rebuild a replacement network device from scratch. That would be way too time consuming and guaranteed to be a failure. Now, what about tracking changes to your network devices? Is this something that you keep track of in some sort of change management solution or at the very least even to a central syslog repository? This way you could be alerted when a change occurs or have the ability to identify a change that may have been the cause of a network outage? Having a good change management solution in place for network devices should absolutely be crucial to any environment. Without one, you will be left wishing that you had one WHEN disaster strikes. Now, how do you handle change management in your environments?