Spiceworks in the Enterprise - Spiceworks Features
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Hardware Inventory
The hardware inventory is the heart of Spiceworks, and probably the place that most people will go first after doing the initial install.
The first thing you’ll need to do is tell Spiceworks what subnets it can scan, and which user will do the scanning. You’ll need to pick a user that has access to all of the machines on your subnet, and (obviously) the subnet must be accessible from the server.
To get the information pertaining to the clients you are scanning, Spiceworks uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), so all of the clients need this service installed and running. Under normal installs this will be the case.
The speed of the scan will depend on a few issues, such as the speed of the server, the speed of the network, the speed of the clients, and so on. Even so, a scan of about 100 clients should take about 40 minutes.
The scan will have difficulties running if the firewall is active on the clients. Additionally, it does a reverse lookup into DNS. It’s a good idea to turn off the clients' firewalls (via group policy or registry change), and make sure your DNS is clean before running the scan. When the scan has finished, your inventory page will be full of discovered devices.
Software inventory
When the scan has completed, as well as the hardware, you will also have a list of all the software installed on your network. You can get a summary of the installed software from the software section on the Inventory page.
One of the problems with many software auditing tools is sometimes they have problems working out what the software is, in relation to other software on the machine. For instance, sometimes it will find Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and instead of classing them as the Microsoft Office package, it thinks they are separate pieces of software.
Spiceworks does quite a good job of this, but on some machines it still classes each part of Office as a separate piece of software.
If you click on one of the software packages in the list, you can see more information on the software, but most importantly you can fill in how many licenses you have for each product. One thing that would be nice to have at this point is the ability to flag software that does not need a license. This way you could flag a service pack or piece of open source software. If you could do this, you won't have to go in and add another license when Spiceworks detects a new install.
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