Use Spiceworks to Control Your Network

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If you manage a network and haven’t tried out Spiceworks yet, you may want to do so. Spiceworks is a free tool for managing computer networks. It is not open source but instead relies on a unique advertising model to keep the system free. The Spiceworks server only runs on Windows but it can monitor and manage a variety of devices and operating systems including Linux and Unix. It also has a plugin architecture that allows developers to add support for additional functionality. This makes Spiceworks a great tool for network management.

Spiceworks can help you maintain an inventory of your network. It scans your network on a regular basis and discovers devices on your network. The system has tools for adding notes about purchases so that you can use Spiceworks to track your IT assets. It can also be used as an audit tool. You can add information about your software licenses. When Spiceworks performs its network scan, it can actually alert you to any recent installation of unlicensed software.

In addition to alerting you to the installation of unlicensed software, Spiceworks can perform monitoring of your network and alert you to any trouble. It can let you know when a device is down or a printer is out of toner. Spiceworks can use SNMP to query devices. It can monitor things like bandwidth usage or disk drive space. It is also capable of some power management features such as wake on LAN.

The monitoring features of Spiceworks are based on a recurring scan of the network so it really cannot be called real-time monitoring. If you have mission critical monitoring needs that require real-time alerts, Spiceworks is not the right tool for the job. However, Nagios, an open source network management tool, can provide real-time alerting and monitoring and it can integrate with Spiceworks. Through a plugin, you can deploy Nagios to handle the real time monitoring but use the Spiceworks desktop to view it. This allows you to use Spiceworks as the front end for a number of network management tools.

Another useful feature of Spiceworks is its helpdesk. A Spiceworks server includes a help desk system for users to open tickets and track work. The helpdesk can integrate with Active Directory so that users can login to the helpdesk using their network credentials. There is also a purchasing module which allows you to include information about needed purchases on your help tickets. Spiceworks is especially useful for managed service providers. The monitoring portion can be deployed remotely. It then sends its data to the main Spiceworks desktop, allowing a MSP to monitor various client networks remotely. Version 5, which is currently in beta, promises to add a number of features to make Spiceworks even more useful for managed service providers.

We mentioned that Spiceworks keeps the software free through a unique advertising model. They have a robust and active IT community including whitepapers and forums. These are sponsored by IT vendors who advertise on the Spiceworks desktop. They also publish whitepapers for the Spiceworks IT community. This unique model actually makes the advertising far less obtrusive as the material supplied by Spiceworks’ vendor partner is often quite useful to IT professionals.

Spiceworks is an incredibly full-featured system that has a number of the same features as high priced managed service provider software. For free, Spiceworks delivers a tools that can automate a number of tedious IT tasks. Anyone who is responsible for managing a network should take a look at it.