Spiceworks IT Tools Review

#spiceworks

Most IT guppies come into the sea of IT with a couple of predetermined ideals that, for lack of better words aren't exactly what it turns out to be.  We come running in guns ablaze "I FIXED COMPUTERS FOR GEEK SQUAD!!!" ready to set the world on fire.  Our lovely desk in the corner of nowhere just seems like such an improvement over what we already have going, but it masks the fact that you're going to have to monitor and report.  Monitoring is a new task you've never had the privilege of really ever having to deal with, and the same goes for reporting.  What is a good suitable solution that'll save your butt for low cost and high awesomeness?  Spiceworks.

Network Scanning

Spiceworks has been for me one of the greatest accidental discoveries of my new IT career.  I was rummaging through our exchange server one day, just looking to see what was installed on it, maybe there was a software I could use, or should learn.  This goofy orange icon was in the bottom left corner, no clue what it was, thought I'd investigate.

Hands down I came to find one of the greatest network monitoring software's available, it starts by grabbing all the information from the active directory.  It grabs IP addresses, it grabs system names, all information about the physical assets it can.  Service pack number, operating system, everything.  By itself this sounds like a pretty basic and boring task, not really selling the idea of how great of a product this is, but that's just the beginning, but in and of itself is a huge asset.  At this point reporting on operating system information, asset information, IP address, and everything in between.  After the AD is accessed spiceworks grabs as much info as it can from your net bios.

After this simple task has been performed of what is supposed to be available on the network, spiceworks will do a ping sweep of the network, so make sure ICMP is enabled on the network workstations and servers.  Otherwise you'll end up with a blank scan, you can make firewall exceptions directly on the computer, or you can configure a GPO which will force ICMP to be available.  If NMAP is enabled the spiceworks application will run the scan using NMAP opposed to a standard ping sweep.

As spiceworks probes the network, it uses all appropriate ports and login credentials required to access the machines.  It then gathers windows events from each system as specified by the server.  If you don't want certain errors to log, such as ID 51 DISK, you can block it.  Leaving you only with errors that are relevant.

From these scans all pertinent information can be gathered and put into a relevant report, really any report needed.  Custom made reports, Spiceworks made, as well as user made.  All downloadable from the report store, 100% for free, and available to anyone.  Reports from what computers hardware is comprised of, all the way to simple reports such as who has weather bug or ask toolbar installed.

The Community

Possibly the best part of Spiceworks, as well as the reason I started using the software, simply due to the level of resourcefulness the community allowed.  The spiceworks community is a mingling place for IT professionals, with a common place for us to converse, discuss, and solve as a whole.  Odds are with the power of hundreds of thousands of like minded individuals, no matter what the problem is, there is an expert available to aid in some way shape or form.  As long as the favor is returned for someone else in the future the actions become greatly appreciated and the community grows.

The community does have its quirks though, as it says "IT Pro's" it means professionals who work in IT.  Any high school student who just wants to learn how to hack is going to get banhammered, or any older person who needs help removing a virus and doesn't want to take the computer to geek squad, doesn't get helped.  The professionals prefer to help with more complex, less "Googleable" tasks.  Tasks like how to install anti virus updates or what does SSD stand for, will get shunned.

Although a group of IT professionals can get pretty rowdy and rude at times, if a student or newbie who wants to one day become an IT professional appears and is just lurking for knowledge, no-one will be upset.  Just don't ask for help with homework, that's one way to earn the ire of everyone in a heartbeat.  Lurk, learn, and assist, really all I can say to help out the students and non IT pro's.

Help Desk

With one more fun side to the software, there is a helpdesk option, not everyone uses this though, as Spiceworks is really for the small business and not the super huge large multi-national conglomerate, so there are plenty of us who just use the scanning software.  But assuming you do have an IT staff and a plethora of users trained to enter problems into a ticketing system, the help desk can be pretty amazing.

Being capable of tracking errors, tracking tasks, and figuring out who needs what is fantastic.  Organization is a key factor in being a full fledged IT professional, all too often is it easy to forget a very important complex task if its not written down.  By organizing it in a single simple interface and assigning tasks to individual staff members to do, track, and aknowledge when done.  Trust me when I say its easy to forget you were supposed to back up someone's PST files because a server failure.  That PST file backup completely gets forgotten and lost in disarray if you didn't have it documented.

Conclusion

Spiceworks all around is an awesome software for small business and medium size business IT professionals.  If you're a future IT professionals and have a cheap ebay rack with a few throw away servers, test out spiceworks and enjoy, you won't regret how great of a software this is.

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