Spiceworks: Free Network Monitoring, Management and so much more.
When starting my last job I needed to get an adequate inventory of equipment on the network including IP, machine name, service tag, name of the user as well as the software installed. I could have spent my spare time running around to each machine running something like Belarc Advisor and writing the rest down. Even on a network of around 30 computers and other peripherals this could be and inadequate use of my time. I started to search around for inventory software that could at least do what Belarc does but run at login and dump to a network share. I even looked at a few solutions such as newt but they proved to be too costly. I finally managed to happen on to Spiceworks.
Spiceworks is a network admin’s swiss army knife. This windows based app takes inventory of your network equipment as well as PC software and hardware. It also handles network and Exchange monitoring, license and asset tracking as well as vendor tracking. It even includes a built in helpdesk and trouble ticketing portal and is integrated with their own support community. It runs as a system tray app or can run as a system service on either a workstation or a server , I recommend the latter. The best part? Its FREE! All of this is accessed through clean a web based interface that is AD Supported. If your organization prefers it can have the AD’s removed for a fee.
To get is information the software uses a combination of WMI, SNMP and in some cases SSH. In an Active Directory environment, turning on WMI (and RPC) is a simple matter of modifying group policy settings. All the information is gathered at specified time intervals remotely and doesn’t require any software to be executed on individual machines.
The software also has customizable reports that can provide a lot of essential information like which PCs have anti-virus installed properly and which ones don’t. In our environment when I wanted to see which Dell servers and workstations had service contracts ready to expire, I was able to create a report with a list of computer names and Dell service tags captured from a scan and export it to a CSV that was easily imported into their customers site.
I have just briefly touched on the power of this software. I recommend an administrator running a network of any size to at least download and evaluate this software. Download it today: http://www.spiceworks.com/