Bcfg2 helps system administrators produce a consistent, reproducible, and verifiable description of their environment, and offers visualization and reporting tools to aid in day-to-day administrative tasks. It is the fifth generation of configuration management tools developed in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory.

It is based on an operational model in which the specification can be used to validate and optionally change the state of clients, but in a feature unique to bcfg2 the client's response to the specification can also be used to assess the completeness of the specification. Using this feature, bcfg2 provides an objective measure of how good a job an administrator has done in specifying the configuration of client systems. Bcfg2 is therefore built to help administrators construct an accurate, comprehensive specification.