5 Reasons Why You Need a Change Management Tool for CUCM

Tracking changes to your Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) environment is a vital but tedious task. You need to know when something changes in case it causes issues to your clusters. Some organizations make do with tracking via spreadsheets and manually taking screenshots. However, manual tracking is prone to error, and a single, minor change like adding a phone will render your spreadsheet out of date. 

And if multiple people are tasked with tracking, there’s a chance that something isn’t documented properly. Who has time to comb through versions of documents to see what changed?

Variphy Change Management for Cisco provides an easy solution to these challenges. Our team is on hand at Cisco Live — visit us at booth #4372 to see how we can help you streamline your CUCM change management.

Here are five reasons why you should move your tracking out of spreadsheets and into a change management tool.

Stay on top of changes to your CUCM environment

1. Compare changes between present and past configurations

When it comes to tracking changes in your environment, there are many configuration elements to consider, such as phones, dial plans, and device pools. You need to see what changed and who made those changes — and better yet, be able to compare your present configuration to historical or baseline configurations. With the ability to compare snapshots of configurations, you will have an easier time auditing your CUCM environment. 

2. Identify and troubleshoot issues quickly

When issues do arise in your UC environment, you and other CUCM administrators need to see if a configuration change is the culprit. The right tool is CUCM-version-aware and can recognize the data fields required for your change management report, allowing you to target issues and resolve them efficiently.

3. Reduce downtime and risk

By providing a clear view of changes before they are applied, the right change management tool can mitigate the risk of unintended consequences from configuration changes. You can analyze the changes and identify any potential issues before applying them to the live environment. This can prevent service disruptions and downtime. 

4. Stay in compliance with approval process

In larger organizations with multiple administrators, it’s crucial to have a process for change approval and compliance. The right change management tool provides a record of changes made by different administrators. This makes it easier to follow change management procedures and comply with organizational policies or regulations.

5. Simplify disaster recovery

In the event of a system failure or disaster, having access to past snapshots of your environment allows for quicker restoration to a known good configuration state. This simplifies disaster recovery efforts and helps get the system back up and running with minimal downtime.

Error-proof your CUCM change management process

The right change management tool can save your organization valuable time and resources. If you’re still manually tracking changes to your CUCM environment, it’s time to consider moving to a tool that automates this task for you.

With Variphy’s Change Management feature, you can schedule configuration snapshots and retain them for as long as you’d like! You can even compare historical snapshots to see what has changed between configurations.

Learn more about our feature here or watch it in action below.