Spiceworks, my favorite tool for managing IT networks, has released a new version. Spiceworks scans your entire network and audits the devices in you infrastructure. Not only does Spiceworks create a comprehensive IT inventory, but it also monitors the health of vital systems. It can alert you when certain conditions are met, errors are found, systems run out of hard disk space, printer ink is low, and much more.
Another cool feature is to have Spiceworks scan multiple sites, and report back to a central collector. This is great for me, as the company I work for, is an outsourced IT Helpdesk for several medium sized businesses. We’ve deployed Spiceworks at all of our clients with more than 10 PCs. This allows our business to be proactive in our approach to IT instead of reactive.
Don’t even get me started on how good Spiceworks has been for License Management.
Spiceworks 4.6 brings a host of new features include:
- View and Kill Processes Remotely
- Ability to discover virtualized servers on VMware (vSphere & ESX/ESXi), showing all the virtual machine data and configuration details
- Better Helpdesk ticket management
- Network mapping improvements
- See network alerts and notifications in your Spiceworks Toolbar
- And more…
If you have never tried Spiceworks, you should. It is free, and after you use it, you will be converted. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s FREE (As in BEER)? I used to work for a software company that developed one of the premier Enterprise IT Discovery platforms, and believe me, Spiceworks can do a lot more than even some multimillion dollar Enterprise platforms. That was always the “dirty little secret”. Anyways, check it out, you’ll love it.
