What is Xoom?

Xoom is a comprehensive solution to the problems of configuration management.

System configuration, particularly in enterprise IT systems, has multiple aspects. Depending on the applications involved, these can include: executable and configuration files, database configuration, database content, system registry, web server configuration, and so on. The various parts of configuration functionally depend on, and often directly reference, each other. Even in an application of relatively modest complexity, there may be thousands of parameters that influence its behaviour. Due to the diverse and sometimes distributed nature of configuration, it is usually difficult to collate its parts, let alone explore or understand its workings. Because of this, configuration management is notoriously complex.

Xoom provides a comprehensive solution to these challenges.

At its core is the ability to retrieve configuration and to bring together all that complexity into a unified, standardised representation that is structured logically and hierarchically, and that can be easily explored. In this representation, Xoom assigns every configuration item at least one unique, environment-independent Xoom identity (multiple Xoom identities are sometimes assigned when the item serves multiple logical roles) and maintains the complex graph of references that exist between items.

Once configuration has been retrieved, it can be saved for future use. It can be compared or combined with configurations from other environments, or compared with historical configurations from the same environment that have been stored in a repository. It can be processed further or analysed: Xoom comes with a whole suite of reports that allow you to view various aspects of configuration in novel and insightful ways. And, most importantly of all, it can be transported from one environment to another.