Many small IT shops find it difficult to manage all of their network devices. In order to track and maintain the systems, you usually need a very expensive setup requiring new systems, etc. or you need to work with an open source system that can be very time consuming and difficult to configure.

In comes Spiceworks! This company offers a free IT desktop that can manage your systems. From their website:

Inventory, monitor and report on the hardware and software on your network.

Track issues and problems, manage your work and run a help desk.

Solve problems with the help of IT pros around the world.

It takes less than 5 minutes to get up and running. No agents. No scripts. No manuals. No hassles. Just download Spiceworks and go.

And, Spiceworks is really free. No trials. No time or device limits. Simply free. All thanks to sponsorships by top technology vendors.

The way the sponsorship works is still not entirely clear to me but I have notices two ways that they are making money:

  1. Google Adwords - there is typically an advertisement on each of the pages for the web management system
  2. Google Search - the search interface has a link to Google search that also displays advertisements

The system itself seems to be pretty good. It runs entirely on your desktop with a web interface. This means that you can access it remotely so that you are not tied to one system.

It also does trouble tickets and e-mail alerts.

The entire system took only a few minutes to set up and then scan the network.

It can manage both Windows (via Windows Authentication) and Non-Windows (via SSH) devices.

An interesting thing to note was that while I was setting it up and scanning the network, it determined that one of the systems that I have set up for employees who come in from other offices was not working correctly. It turns out that the hard drive was on the way out and I would not have known this had I not been testing Spiceworks!

It does require you to enter an e-mail address when setting up the system so that they can “keep in touch” but I have not received any spam on the address that I gave them to this point. The only thing that I got was a message indicating that a new version was available.

Here are a few useful links to the Spiceworks product:

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Tim Fehlman