Spiceworks: A free tool for IT Management

Are you looking for an IT management solution? Actually we have a few solutions which help you in your IT daily management. If you have enough money, you could purchase Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, which could help you in terms of which computers, software, etc. we have in our network. 

On the other hand we have also a few free solutions; one of those is OCS inventory, which enables you to create an IT inventory about hardware, software, etc… Also if you need a ticketing tool you could add to OCS the GLPI, which is also open source.

But in my particular experience I found GLPI and OCS very complicated in terms of configuring. 

Now we have another free solution, which is spiceworks. One important difference from spiceworks to GLPI/OCS is that you don´t need a client installed in each machine you want to inventory.

Others features of spiceworks are inventory, monitoring, help desk, and an online community which helps you finding solutions to fix IT problems.

In order to install we need a machine with a windows OS installed. We must download the spiceworks software from: http://www.spiceworks.com/download/ and once we have it downloaded we must launch this installer.

On the first window we must set the port that we are going to use to access spicework from other computer in our network. By defect this port is settled to 9675.

In the next windows we must accept the terms of use, destination folder, and the installation begins. Finally we have this window at the end of the installation process.

At this point we have an Icon at the desktop which opens a browser to the direction http://localhost:9675, and opens the web in which we are going to configure our spiceworks environment.

First of all we need to create an account which will let you log into your Spiceworks app, and also to the online community.

Once loged in with your account you will be asked what do you want to do first, Inventory, Help Desk, or Configuration BackUp.

For the first time we are going to choose Inventory and for this we would new some data:

•     For the windows computers, we would need the name and the password for the administrator.
•     For de OSX computers the same.

Once the scan has been completed we could find a screen like this.

Here we can see the objects found in my network. We could store a lot of information about each dispositive found, such us name, OS installed, serial number, etc. For example in the following window we can see the information gather by spicework for one of my routers. We could see the serial number, the manufacturer, the MAC Address, etc.. There are more information that we could add on our own. This info could help us with the warranty, dates of purchase, solutions for know issues, etc…

With Spiceworks you can manage all the devices in your network, such as desktops, laptops, printers, servers, networking components, UPS, etc… Also you can uso a remote agent to control os a LogMeIn Rescue Console.

In future entries I would tell you something about ticketing with spiceworks.