I've started testing out Spiceworks on our campus network. Spiceworks is an IT inventory, monitoring and help desk system. It has a dizzying array of features which you can read about on their web site, and that I'm sure I'll get around to describing on this blog eventually. I really like what I have seen so far.
The most interesting thing to me is that Spiceworks has adopted a much different business model than some of the other companies; an ad supported model that is completely free to the enduser. Since my boss told me my budget for an inventory system might be "something like $300" I immediately started looking for a free system to track our IT assets.
All interaction with Spiceworks is entirely done through a web browser (Chrome works great) and there are advertisements to the right of the actual interface. The ads are not too intrusive and are actually sometimes interesting, but they can easily be ignored while you focus on the task at hand.
So far I have scanned my entire network for devices. With some small amount of configuration it will detect switches, routers, PC, Macs, WiFi access points, VMware servers, printers and nearly anything else that can have an ip address. Spiceworks manages to do this without any client side agents through a combination of SNMP, Windows Authentication, WMI, and SSH. It can do a network wide software inventory, and backup configurations of Cisco equipment to a built in TFTP server on a schedule.
I have just started to scratch the surface of what Spiceworks can do, I have yet to explore the trouble ticket system or some of the more advanced control features possible with SNMP.
I'll definately be doing more posts about Spiceworks in the future, but if you are looking for and IT inventory and control system I would say that Spiceworks is worth a look.
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