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 Post subject: SpiceWorks
PostPosted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 7:21 am 
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Has anyone played with SpiceWorks? It looks pretty cool. Might give us some good ideas for Open-Audit. Looks like it was done in Ruby.

http://www.spiceworks.com/


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 Post subject: re: spiceworks
PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2007 3:43 am 
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I just installed it yesterday to play around with it and thus far, I still like Open-AudIT better for my purposes.

It's definitely full of cool ideas and has a good framework in place, but the auditing portion, at least, isn't quite as good. I heard one guy describe the system as a "Jack of all Trades, Master of None" and I think that's pretty accurate. It attempts to squeeze Inventory, Monitoring, Alerting, Helpdesk ticketing, and even an online IT community all in one.

The ruby app installs itself on your local machine and runs as a webapp on http://localhost:9675. It keeps running as a service and performs scans from your machine as well. I'm not sure if it's intended to live on a dedicated scanning box elsewhere (not your desktop). You log into the app with a user/pass, which also logs you into the discussion groups.

I've really only played with the inventory portion so far, and couldn't understand why the scan didn't go as well as Open-AudIT. It would seem to query via WMI just the same, yet it missed some machines and others came back as "unknown". These were boxes Open-AudIT had caught just fine the same day, so I know they were turned on/WMI/DCOM/whatever accessible. Can't imagine why. The reporting displays arent as useful either and it lacks some cool things we have here such as CD-KEYS (my fav).

Still some things are kindof pretty and the ticket system might be ok, I need to play with it more. The community forum sports active developer participation, listening to probs/feature requests, so there's the potential for it to improve more in the future.

Oh, it's also free because it integrates a non-obtrusive vertical ad banner along the right side.

Anyway, I'll keep playing with it, but won't be getting rid of Open-AudIT anytime soon.

--Brandon


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PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2007 8:53 am 
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daikichi, thanks for the thoughts. Can you let us know places where Spiceworks is better than OA, and how we could improve OA to match or better it ?


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PostPosted: Wed May 09, 2007 7:15 am 
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I could never get it to scan my network. It might have been a Vista issue.


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 Post subject: re: Spiceworks
PostPosted: Wed May 09, 2007 9:30 am 
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Well, as I mentioned, it's sort of a multi faceted product, in that it also incorporates ticketing and monitoring as well as inventory. I'm not sure that Open-AudIT plans on going down this path in the future or if we should even want it to.

OA's inventory already works better IMO, since it's actually inventoried my whole Windows network and Spiceworks hasn't :)

It may be because Spiceworks relies on a general network scan vs the OA LDAP approach? Not sure. Because of this however, it did sortof detect some of my *nix boxes. I know OA can do this as well via the nmap/*nix audit, but I haven't tried it yet. Really should.

I must admit that some of the basic monitoring was actually sort of useful. One of my favorite parts was that it detected our HP 2600n printer and alerted things like "less than %33 cyan toner". Kinda cool. We use things like nagios, bb/hobbit around here, which I suppose might be able to extract such messages from the printer as well. I suppose I should look into it.

I'll play with it some more and see if any other features really stand out. Right now, I think the fact that OA actually works beats out Spiceworks' fancy UI and easy install.


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PostPosted: Fri May 11, 2007 11:53 pm 
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I'm actually the one that was quoted at the top "jack of all trades, master of none" ;) via my blog entry here: http://maximillianx.blogspot.com/2007/0 ... rvice.html

However, with that being said, I still use Open Audit at my workplace, even after testing Spiceworks. SW has a (at least at one time) a performance limit of around 250 computers. Also, while I loved the interface, I love being able to tweak and modify Open Audit even more. Also, I can schedule audit tasks at the client level rather than have the SW server do it at scheduled intervals.

I think one feature of Open Audit which really could be developed further is the ad-hoc reporting. This was a feature of Spiceworks that I loved. Maybe the ability of putting computers into 'categories' (aka 'collections' in the SMS world).

Next, many people like the ticketing aspect, in addition to the (now new) feature in SW for multiple agent logons to view ticket assignments.

One aspect where SW really shines is the community aspect. I'll be frank, and I know and understand that there is a dedicated staff there at SW and OA is more of a volunteer set-up, but their community is much more responsive and active than Open Audit's. Not that this has turned me off, by any means, but this might be a deciding factor for some...just trying to point out where I see some room for improvement.

I feel somewhat indifferent about the monitoring part of SW. Really, to have true monitoring, you should have something that reports in at a pretty frequent basis, and I'm not interested in having SW scan the entire network every couple of minutes.

The drop-downs and cool fade-ins/outs are nifty, but I could take or leave those when it comes right down to getting the information I need quickly. I may try Spiceworks again here in the future, but Open Audit is serving my purpose quite nicely!

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Server Info:
OS : Windows Server 2003
Auditing: ~300 machines
LDAP: Windows Server 2003 Active Directory


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PostPosted: Sat May 12, 2007 5:47 am 
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Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
I agree. The data that Spiceworks captures isn't as detailed as OpenAudit (and therefore it's not as useful).

I actually implemented my own helpdesk ticketing system for Winventory (the previous incarnation of Open Audit) and it works really well in conjunction with the inventory data and the ldap support I built into it. I think that something similar would be really useful in Open Audit and would really help to promote it as a compete helpdesk solution. Unfortunately the way the pages are coded for Open Audit is completely different than it was for Winventory. It's big improvement (especially for multiple language support) but in order to port my ticketing system to Open Audit it would require a complete rewrite. I may do this in time anyhow but for now I am content to continue using Winventory until Open Audit catches up in terms of features (license tracking, ad hoc queries, hardware and software groups etc).


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PostPosted: Sat May 12, 2007 6:10 am 
Just a quick comment for those interested - I believe Kris M's code is in the svn repository under branches/ittickets_mod. Feel free to hack at it if you find you really want it for OA.


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 2:29 am 
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Although I haven't used SW personally, our medium-sized company has used OpenAudit for about 6 months now.

What we could really use that SW claims to have that OA doesn't is the monitoring. We probably wouldn't need monitoring for all the clients on the network, just a few select servers.

Also, our company needed a way to keep track of scheduled maintenance tasks, so I modified OA a bit to do that, which I posted about in another thread, but it appears neither OA nor SW provides that service as of yet.

As far as the help desk ticket management, we already take care of that in our intranet application, and we would have no need or want for it to be integrated into openaudit.

As far as pretty graphics go, we would much prefer something that loaded quickly and took up as little memory as possible in our clients' browsers.


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:18 am 
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Location: Auckland, NZ
I use Zabbix for the nitty gritty monitoring of servers and desktops i.e CPU, processes, memory, disk usage etc but I also run OA regularly, hourly in most cases either via schedular or the Zabbix agent so that I have a baseline for changes to Software, AV updates, Startup items, Patches etc. I am now working on a way to be notified when a baseline change has occured either by injecting a ticket into my ticket system or triggering an alarm in Zabbix which will in turn inject into my ticket system.

I would like to see OA be able to be run as a service with selectable update times.

Jon

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Computer Troubleshooters - Howick
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http://technologysolved.co.nz


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 2:52 am 
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I am evaluating Spiceworks right now...

I really only have 90 workstations plus another 80 devices... kind of a neat setup...

doesn't require me to load a login script and it seems to be fairly easy to setup...

also the help desk ticket system is pretty nice...

What I would like for Open-audit to so is some of these custom report options as well as have an Ad-ldap ticket system that auto logs which machine they are submitting their problem from...

I see a ticket system in the branches however I haven't been able to test it yet... kinda don't want to mess up my live database but will be testing that soon against a test location.


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 7:33 am 
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Hi Guys, a quick question - do you guys like the "prettyness" of the SW interface, or do you prefer the "no nonsense" OA approach ? Should OA move towards prettying up our interface ? OA was designed to be functional, rather than pretty, but I definitley realise people like "bling" - especially non-technical type people. This might help OA get into shops where you have to run it past you manager, supervisor, etc who aren't as tech as you....


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 7:56 am 
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I was looking the bling effect and it is really pretty... however OA has a fast load and as an admin I like fast load...

I also kinda prefer the scans the way OA Does it but like the ability to scan remotely from a page as well if I choose to on demand. SW did offer a nice feature there...

Here is what their v6 will have instore just got the email...

http://www.spiceworks.com/hero/features_intro.php

Again Help desk I like
Remote control They are getting... but I would like to see OA have another way to handle this but if vbs is all then at least it works and works well!

I'm still an open audit user because I like the db and application to be hosted on my VM Linux boxes and not waste a MS workstation / server License... those cost $$'s


However Spiceworks is doing some custom reporting but I did see that with ODBC Connection tutorial OA Will / Can do some custom auditing as well.... I'll be playing with that soon hopefully!


Again just throwing some of what I saw into the pot...

Still OW 80% SW 20%
Primarily SW gets 20% for bling and ease of use and setup


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:19 am 
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Location: South Carolina
Which way does OA not remote control? RDP,VNC and i know i have a Netsupport option but what other way is there?


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 2:16 pm 
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It does remote control them... it just uses vbs to do it... I think oa has more options than spice works actually... but sw's eye candy is pretty nice!!

Unfortunately its not linux its only win32 compatible for the server


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