I haven’t used Spiceworks since version 2, I was quite impressed with it back then and I know the product has developed quite a lot in that time, so I was hoping it has improved even more. As in the previous post i have done a few timings, and noted what the scanning of the network has managed to find.

This test was completed in a completely different environment than the previous tests, so its not really fair to compare this version with say version 2. Spiceworks was installed to a Dell 1850 server, running windows 2003 with 2gig ram. I scanned 6 subnets in all, containing lots of different devices (pc’s, phones, routers etc). Clients are mainly Dell optiplex’s running Win XP, printers mainly HP.

Test Results

Test Conclusions

Speed
The first thing to hit me was the scanning speed, I had given spiceworks a lot more work do to then in the previous tests, but i was still a little disapointed at the time it took to initially scan the network. There was a lot of kit to find and identify, but it took a little longer than I would have thought

That said, the initial scan is a one of event, and subsequent ones once the majority of devices have been found are nice and fast. I’m not sure if the speed is really that big an issue, I would prefer to sacrifice a bit of scan time to get more accurate results.

Hardware Results
So, did Spiceworks actually manage to identify all the hardware on the network, and work out what it was. For the most part, yes it did. Unless there was a connectivity problem with the machine, it did manage to work out what it was. I correctly identified all the workstations and servers, and managed to extract out the information on the hardware.

It does tend to class most of the network kit as ‘Other Devices’, i’m assuming this is because it cant authorise its self on the device, but i’m not sure, it just seems to see them as http devices. I was going to try and scan a test device, but there is no scanning option to pass a telnet password to a box, even if you could I’m not convinced it would be able to tell what it was

It did however, manage to recognise all the printer correctly, and in most cases it was reporting back information on the status of the device correctly

Software Result
This is one area where I found it difficult to tell if Spiceworks was working right or not, as I dont have an up-to-date list of the software on the machines. To try and test it I picked a couple of machines at random and looked at the software on them, it managed in both cases to get pretty close to what was on the actual box. I like the feature of the software list that tells you the oldest and newest versions of things, this would be very handy if you are rolling out some software and want to make sure everything has got the correct version

Interface and Features
As I have not used Spiceworks since version 2, i’m not sure what is new this version and what has been in for a while. I do like the time line function, it would be nice if it could update in real time but then you would be scanning your network all the time.

The reporting system seems a lot more customizable, as you can now not only decided what you want to see, but organise the columns on the reports as well, and filter down what you want to see. The export options are pritty standard, but I would have expected to see an xml option along with the others. It is missing some advanced reporting features (grouping, custom fields etc.) and has no support for generating graphs, but those are probably not that important.

The network map is a nice idea, but i’m not really sure what use it would be, normally you would probably only be interested in this information for your network kit, and Cisco already have some specific tools to do this.

Summing Up
While the product is not perfect by any means, for a free bit of software you cant really get much better for a small or medium size organisation. The hardware/software inventory is accurate, if a little slow and does seem to struggle with network kit.

The interface is very easy to use, and its easy to customise the dashboard so you can see the information that interests you. The adverts do get in the way a bit sometimes, but you can always pay to get them removed.

All in all this is another very good version, and if your in the market for some network auditing/reporting tools, for the (lack of) price this is one of the best.

Here’s a list of some of the new features that interested me

• The interface has been cleaned up quite a bit from the previous version. There are also a couple of new features such as the ‘Glide’ function, it’s kind of like the iPod artwork browser.
• The network scanning has speed has been improved (see my test results below)
• The detection of devices has been improved.
• Exchange server monitoring. (i think this is particularity cool)
• Whole Environment event charts
• Loads of bug fixes

Scanning Speed and Device Detection Test Results

In my previous blog on Spiceworks 2.0, I did I direct comparison of how fast a network scan completed, and what it managed to find.
Here are the results for the test of Spiceworks 3.0 against Spiceworks 2.0. I used exactly the same server (an average spec dell poweredge server) and scanned the same vlans as before.

As you can see from the results, the scanning speed as improved yet again, shaving almost 15 minutes of Spiceworks 2. It Did find slightly less workstations, but I don’t think that would have added another 15 minutes to the scan time.

All the software it found was valid, and seemed at a quick glance to be accurate.

However, it wasn’t all good news. I’m not sure why but it classed the network devices (3 Cisco routers and 6 POE switches) as unknown. On more careful investigation it knew they were Cisco network devices but it couldn’t tell what sort. I assume there is some authentication problem happening here but i’m not sure what it is.

New Features

Now, onto some of the brand new things Spiceworks 3 can do.

The interface, especially the landing page has been cleaned up. You can now customise it quite a bit. It now includes a couple of new widgets about the environment and exchange (more on these later) and the ability to add new tools to the menu on the left.

You can now organise your inventory into your own groups, and then view them using the new ‘glide’ function. This looks a lot like the album artwork browser used in iPods/iTunes. You can use it by hitting the glide button at the top right of the page.

While it looks good, I dont really see the point in it as it’s far quicker to just the conventional methods.

Exchange Server Monitoring:
There is now a new section on the start page that will give you a quick overview of any exchange servers on your network, it will look something like this:

it lets you see at a glance the size of the largest mailboxes on your server, and the amount of load its under. If you look at the exchange server in the inventory you will also get a new section called exchange.
Under her you can get some more info on your server such as some stats on incoming and outgoing mail, along with a list of all the mailbox’s, their sizes, who the account belongs to and who last accessed it.

I did have a slight problem getting the exchange information to come into Spiceworks, the server already existed under the old version, so I had to remove it from the inventory and re-scan. When version 3 re-scanned everything popped in right away.

Environment Charts: As well as the new exchange widget on the landing page, there is also one that will show you some other usful status about your environment, it looks like this:

By default it shows you a chart of the number of events (gathered from the event logs), on a day by day basis. This could be very helpful in spotting if something is going wrong all of a sudden and causing lots of entry’s in your event logs.

As well as the events, you can use the scroll buttons to see other charts such as time spent on helpdesk tickets, network interface top port traffic, breakdown of your operating systems and many more.

Improved Reporting: The inbuilt reporting system has also been given a bit of a facelift. You can now control who can use the reports (not to a particularly fine level though), and you have the ability to share your reports with other people using Spiceworks. To me though, the reporting system still falls a bit short of what it could be, and seems to be a bit under developed compared to the rest of the product.

Helpdesk: This is now better integrated into Exchange, so users can now email there support calls directly into the helpdesk, Spiceworks simply monitors a mailbox for incoming mail. You can also now add custom elements to your helpdesk tickets to better suit it to your business.

There is also a new section that kind of come’s under the helpdesk called IT Services. The idea behind it is you can keep a track of all your hardware and software vendors, and save documentation into Spiceworks. You can also see what other Spiceworks users think of the vendors you are using. Soon bad service wont be able to hide!

Conclusions

So, is it worth installing. Well, I would say yes unless you have quite a bit of money to spend on other products. With each new release the Spiceworks team are basing the new features on user feedback, witch can only be a good thing for the software.

While it might still not be perfect, it is by far and away the best free (well, ad sponsored) integrated network management and helpdesk system out there at the moment. Even if you are in a big enterprise, i would sugest installing it just to see if any of its features can help you. It is free after all.

When I first started to use Spiceworks, one of my main complaints was that you couldn’t access the data outside of the Spiceworks desktop interface. Well, turns out I was wrong.

I first had my eye’s opened from this thread on the Spiceworks forums. It informed me that it uses a SQLite database to store all its information. So, I asumed getting at the data would be easy. As with most things I was mistaken.

I wanted to use SQL Reporting Services to show the data, so the first thing I needed was an ODBC Driver. I found one at http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/, so I downloaded and installed it. I created an ODBC entry, a new project in reporting services and pointed it to this data source, added a report, went to the Query builder to try and add some tables but to my surprise there was nothing there:

So, how was I supposed to get a list of the tables? I could have tried to write an application in dotnet to try and query it, but that sounded like hard work so I thought about using Excel instead, as it has its own in built query editor. This is where I managed to get the table information from, but it was more luck than judgement.

Open up Excel, go into the Data menu, then Import External Data, New Database Query. (if you have never used this before it will install the old Excel query app). You will then get the Choose Data Source Window, find your Spiceworks ODBC in the list and hit OK. You should get this error:

Hit OK on the error and you will drop to the Query Wizard screen. From here hit Options and you will get a list of (surprisingly) table options. At this point they will probably all be ticked. Untick them all and hit OK

Once you have hit OK, go into the Options again and this time select all (tables, views, system tables, synonyms) the options again. Then OK again. This time (as if by magic), you should get a list of all the database tables in the left hand column!

As a test, select one of the tables (say devices) and drop it into the query and get it to put the data into Excel. After a second or so the sheet should update and contain the contents of the devices table!

So, now I can get a list of the tables out (long winded as it may be), I can now use SQL Reporting services to query Spiceworks. I did I quick test by creating a reporting and doing a select * from devices and it worked a treat.

In the next part of the article I will go through writing a simple report in SQL Reporting Services.

One thing that has caught my attention is they are using feedback from the community to drive the product forwards. According to the press release email, they visited an office in New York and acted on there suggestions. You can also request a feature be added through the feature request forum at http://community.spiceworks.com/forum/1

If you feel like there is something missing from the product get on here and let them know. I am going to log a request now that they open up there database a bit more so you can use external products (Reporting Services, Crystal etc) to pull data out.

One of the new features in version 2.0 of spiceworks is the ability to monitor for certain events in machines event logs, or to check for certain machine software configs, such as 2 different anti-virus products installed. There are other products out that will do a similar job but this article is about what the new Spiceworks brings to the party.

All the options can be configured from the Settings tab in the main Spiceworks window, and we are interested in 3 of these sections:

• Monitors and Alerts
• Email Notifications
• Event Logging

Email and user Settings

Start in Email Notifications, from here you setup all your email information such as SMTP server info, what outgoing email address and POP3 server details(i cant really see why you would use one?)
Once you have entered the settings and hit save, it will test the settings and send a test email to the user you are logged in as.

Once the email settings are correct, you need to make sure that the relevant users are setup to receive them. From the Settings page go into user accounts, and click the Notify Me option against all the Spiceworks users you want to receive notification emails.

Creating Alerts

Once that is done, its time to create some events you want to monitor. This is done via Monitors and Alerts section in Settings. When you open the page there are already some example alerts setup, but just start by creating one of your own by hitting the Add button that the bottom of the list.

There are a 8 types you can choose from to monitor (antivirus, device, disk, software, service, hotfix, user account and printer supply level) , and each one of them has different conditions, and you can limit the type of device you want to monitor (it would be even better if you could just make it monitor a specific device, version 3 anyone?).

As an example will create a new monitor to let us know when the print spooler service is stopped on a server, as this might gives you a heads up to printing issues.

Assuming you have already hit Add, change the type to service, then type in spooler in the name text box, change the condition to is stopped, apply to All servers, tick the email option and then hit save to create your new monitor.

Next time a scan is done of your network, you should be notified of any server where the print spooler service has been stopped. Please not this is not a dynamic feature, and it will only tell you the next time a scan is carried out, and the condition is met.

Event Logs

When a device is scanned, Spiceworks will attempt to gather the event logs of it. This can be very useful in tracking trends across your servers if you are having (for instance) active directory replication, or security issues.

By default Spiceworks will gather all Error and warning logs, but ignores information ones. If you open up the Event logging section of settings you can tell it what other specific events you are interested in (like print jobs, this would be event id 10, see eventid.net for more event id’s).

Once you have added (or excluded) events, the next time a scan runs they should be picked up. To see events, on your inventory tab, click on a device you are interested in, then select the Events section at the bottom and you will be presented with the info, like below

The only thing that is missing is the ability to compare graphs across devices, that would be very handy. You could do this if Spiceworks opened up access into there data source, but thats not happened yet (and I don’t know if it will, thats my only major complaint)

So now you know how to setup the monitoring, if you dont already do something similar you can now get a head up about whats going on in your environment!

I am going to look at a couple of areas for the test:

• Hardware Inventory scanning. Is it any quicker and does it recognize all the devices?
• Software Inventory scanning. Does it find all the software you expect, and does it know how to classify it
• Is the interface any faster. Version one was quite slow, this version is meant to be more responsive

To try and make the tests fair, I ran the old version and the new version on the same hardware (a Dell poweredge server) , and at the same time of day, so both versions should have the same amount of work to do. The Server was also scanning 3 different vlans on both tests.

Test Results

Test Conclusions

So, the initial clam of Spicworks 2 being a lot faster in the scanning stakes is indeed true, and I have to say the speed increase was very impressive. Now onto what it actually found.

In order to try and see how valid the results of both versions of Spiceworks were, after they had finished scanning I ran an IP network scanner, and the total number of devices found on the 3 subnets did indeed add up to what Spiceworks was telling me. So both versions did see all the devices attached to the network.

When I looked closer at the devices it had flagged as unknown, they all turned out to be Cisco network devices (routers, switches and a couple of phones). This was the same for both versions, and I was a little surprised version 2 could not recognize them, but for what the software is aimed at this is probably not that important.

Now software. Unfortunately I did’nt have any real way of checking if what Spiceworks was telling me was true, but checking through what versions of Office, Acrobat etc it thought was installed,both versions seamed close to the mark. One of the things I like about Spiceworks compared to other tools that do software auditing is the fact it can actually tell the difference between a hotfix and an actual application. For some reason other tools I have used in the past had real trouble with that.

The only thing I’m suspect of software wise is its reporting of virus software and versions. It seemed to think an awful lot of machines didn’t have the correct signatures on. I did check a few machines and they looked fine to me. I am at a bit of a lose of how it actually decides what signature version should be installed.

Lastly, the interface. The actual look of it in version 2 hasn’t changed much from version 1. One thing I was interested in was is the new interface any quicker. Well, the answer does seem to be yes. But not my much. Going into the inventory page on version 1 used to take up to 7 seconds (from my machine anyway), this had improved in the new version but not by much. There was a bit more Ajax style coolness in some parts of the interface, but nothing mind blowing.

So, is it any good?
I personally think yes, for free (well, ad sponsored) software it is very good. It has some limitations like you cant get access to its underlying database (not that I could see anyway) and the interface is still not lightening fast, but overall its very good for small to medium size networks.

Go to http://www.spiceworks.com for the latest build and other news and info

The website looks very snazzy, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much in the way of new features. They are putting a lot of emphasis on it being ‘Faster’. Hopefully the web interface will preform a little better as sometimes I found it a bit laggy, but I thought the actual scanning of the devices was quite fast, considering how much it was doing.

There is something in there now that looks like it will collect event logs from you devices, that is a nice touch but not all that much use to me personally as we us a syslog daemon from Kiwi and Snare agents on the servers to send the logs out. The Kiwi syslog good for setting up alerts based on events you specify, hopefully you will be able to do something like this in Spiceworks

The rest of the updates look like they are purely cosmetic. Graphs and things look nice but they dont really bring much to the app, I would have liked to have seen the ability to extend it with user submitted plugins, now that would have been a real step forward

Using WMI it gets hardware and software information for each device, and records it all in a database. We are going to use it for its software auditing purposes, it will give you lists of sortware installed on your network, and you can upload details of your licences into it to keep track of what software you have that is legal. I think it will even warn you if some new software appears that’s new or unlicensed.

The thing that makes Spiceworks different from its rivals, is that fact that it is completely free. The only thing that it does do is display advertisements in the browser console. Now, call me daft but i’m quite prepared to put up with an advert (they dont take up much room or distract you much) if quality software like this is free.

Some of the auditing tools we have used in the past haven’t been very good, there main problem used to be picking up windows components and listing them as separate software, so you ended up with a huge list that meant nothing. Spiceworks manages to filter all this out into a list that actually makes sense and work with.

The only problem we had was upon running a scan, there were quite a few errors (about 20% of machines). They said something like cannot get authenticated on the client. There is a page you can call up on the client machine that will attempt to diagnose the problem (urlofspiceworks/fix), upon running this we could see it was trying to authenticate on a different machine. A quick look in the reverse DNS lookups told us that the IP address of our problem client was in DNS numerous times with different names.

A quick clean up of DNS and a re-scan in Spiceworks, and virtually all the problems had gone. For small to medium sizes networks, I would recommend downloading it and giving it a try. Get it from www.spiceworks.com