First, I must say that my job requires some serious decision making when it comes to continuity and compliance. And at the same time, I find that very often, I am required to make huge decisions on the fly and with a shoe-string budget. The only way to survive these kinds of situations is to find allies, creative solutions and free applications. Spiceworks is one of those applications that makes my life VERY easy.
Spiceworks is a free application that keep catalogs a ton of information for administrative use.
Spiceworks (www.spiceworks.com)Spiceworks runs on your network and catalogs information regarding workstations, servers, printers, etc. In an easy to use GUI, Spiceworks detects installed software, patch levels, and any type of network anomalies that could cause issues. This application is 100% free and is available to anyone who wants it. If this sounds too good to be true, please read on. The following are the caveats of the privacy policy.
Privacy Policy: http://www.spiceworks.com/privacy/
- All of this configuration information is stored locally in a file on your computer in an encoded format. Access to this file is password protected using the operating systems access control mechanisms. None of this configuration information is sent to, or stored at, Spiceworks. This file and its contents are not made accessible through the Spiceworks Desktop to Spiceworks.
- From time to time, the Spiceworks Desktop does collect a limited amount of anonymous aggregate information about your computing environment. This information is collected into groups so that it no longer reflects or references an individually identifiable user, device, or software application. No device-specific or software-specific information is stored at Spiceworks.
- Your copy of the Spiceworks Desktop includes a unique application number. When you install the Spiceworks Desktop, this number and a message indicating whether the installation succeeded or failed, is sent back to Spiceworks. Also, when the Spiceworks Desktop automatically checks to see if a new version is available, the current version number and the unique application number are sent to Spiceworks.
- We may share anonymous aggregated information with third parties outside of Spiceworks.
- We may use log file information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users’ movements around the site, to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole, and to operate and improve the Spiceworks technologies and services.
This information that is gathered does not breech our privacy policies and simply put, is anonymous enough that I can feel very comfortable sharing the little bit of data these guys receive. Heck, if you can install windows on a machine with all of Microsoft’s intrusions and unexpected reboots and such, then this little application will be seen as non-issue.
Pros vs. Cons
Pros:
- Very thorough. Once the scan was over, I could easily identify how many copies of a particular program were running and their associated versions.
- It also catalogues extremely useful information like MAC addresses, serial numbers and IP addresses.
- Spiceworks will work for both Windows and other platforms.
- Spiceworks makes short work of identifying machines that need immediate attention.
- It’s nice to be a bit more proactive.
Cons:
- It has issues with your virus/malware solution. So, you have to right off the bat make sure that it has needed rights in your firewall and virus/malware software, or you will hang.
- Extremely slow for the first scan.
- Processor intensive. You can either have a dedicated machine, or make sure that your processor is dual core and have more than 512mb of ram.
- There are ads. But, reall, what did you expect for free?!
My Thoughts:
The data is password protected and stored locally. My machine is a windows xp, Core 2 Duo, Dell SC440, with 1GB of RAM. It is slow on the onset and that makes sense since it is scanning the entire network. Once it is running, it is an amazing app that I am not willing to live without.
So, you make the choice!