There has been a new beta version of Spiceworks 2 released this week, so i’ve decided to put it to the test and see if the improvements are as good as they are

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.

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I Got an email this morning that contained a link to a page with some more info on the upcoming version 2 of Spiceworks, read more about it here - http://www.spiceworks.com/2.0/preview/

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

Due to the fact we are going to get an Audit, we have recently installed Spiceworks on our network. For those who have never heard of it, Spiceworks is a web based appliction that gathers information ion all the devices on your network.

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