Spicing up Network Management with Spiceworks
I’ve decided to take another look at Spiceworks today as it’s been sitting on a virtual server ticking away for around a month now. Spiceworks describes itself as ‘The Free IT Desktop’ and is essentially a network management utility. The thing that strikes me most is how clean and well laid out the interface is. Yes, there are those advertisements (that help to keep it free) but at least they are tucked away on the right hand side out of the way of the main action.
The product doesn’t come with any sort of manual and that suits me just fine - I can’t stand reading manuals. Fortunately everything seems quite straightforward and I managed to get up and running with the various pointers included in the program.
Spiceworks consists of a number of primary areas including an inventory discovery section, a help desk, problem alerting system, reporting tools and a configurable default page. From what I’ve seen so far the inventory summary is the heart of the product and is certainly where I seem to spend most of my time.
Unusually, the inventory discovery only detected one of two identical art studio workstations in operation and placed the other into an unknown category together with an older NT 4 server connected to and driving our imagesetter. Mind you at least it has picked them up somewhere and this could point to a configuration issue on the users machine - something to check out later. I will be interested to see if it picks up my new Seiko Smart Label Printer which I installed today on my local laptop.
One of the benefits of the product over something like MOM or SCE is that it doesn’t need a client install as it relies on using WMI for obtaining information which pleases me no end as I’m always worried about installing these little client programs on production servers. However, the reliance on WMI does mean that machines like my old NT 4 server aren’t going to get analysed automatically and will require manual intervention. Of course the flip side of no client-installation means that real-time monitoring of any sort is out the window although you can opt to re-scan the network as short as 30 minutes to once per day.
As I said earlier, I do like the inventory summary screen which gives some useful and clear information and the drill downs allow me to peek further into potential configuration conflicts, for example it tells me that four out of fourteen servers are reporting a NETBIOS workgroup name instead of a domain name. The Microsoft Security Bulletin page is also a useful addition to the default page saving me at least a few clicks and presenting useful information in a place where I can do something about it.
It is clear that a great deal of thought and effort has gone into the product, particularly noticeable are the quick tips - for instance when creating a help desk ticket I was prompted that it might be more beneficial to click on the particular asset and create the ticket from there. In a busy environment these sorts of pointers really help to ensure that things are done efficiently from the outset.
Overall, Spiceworks is an excellent example of a well implemented network management software, and being free only adds to its appeal. With the right amount of time and effort employed at the outset in configuring and fine tuning then I am pretty sure it will prove to be a very useful addition to my toolset.
For more information visit the Spiceworks website.
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