Spiceworks in the Enterprise - Application Speed
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While using Spiceworks there are two main areas of concern when it comes to the speed of the product, the speed of the interface and the speed with which it scans the hardware on the network.
In my tests, it was taking version 2.1 of the software about 40 minutes to scan two subnets containing 60 devices. The devices included printers, PCs, networking equipment and IP phones. The performance did drop on larger networks or if you gave it more subnets to do, but it was still acceptable, and wouldn’t really matter that much if you ran the scans overnight.
The actual interface is entirely web-based, so you would expect the interface to be quite responsive. Under most circumstances it is, but if you get a few users on it, loading the initial page can sometime take up to 50 seconds, and the hardware inventory tab can be a bit unresponsive at times.
My testing was done on quite high end hardware, so I wouldn’t recommend running it on a normal client machine unless you can't avoid it.
Issues
There are a few issues with Spiceworks, as with most products (especially free ones). The Windows PCs need to be running WMI in order for the scan to pick up any useful information. By default, most Windows installations will have the service running, but you may have turned it off due to security concerns.
At the time of this article there was no integration with Active Directory, which would be a nice feature. As it stands you have to manually log in to the system and set up any IT support users, and clients wanting to use the helpdesk need to log in as well.
The backend to the system is a SQLite database. While this is very good for small applications, if you end up with lots of data in Spiceworks I would imagine there would start to be some performance issues. Ideally you should be able to scale the database up to SQL Server, MySQL, and so forth. The only problem then is that there would be configuration to do outside of Spiceworks, witch I can see developers wanting to avoid.
Spiceworks Community
One of the great things about this product is that, even though it is free, there is a thriving community built around it on the Spiceworks website. If you are having problems with it, posting a question on the board will more than likely get you an answer within a couple of hours.
The developers also seem to use the boards to gain insight as to what the users want to see in upcoming versions, as well as actually visiting real world companies to see how people are actually using the software.
Summing up
This product is very good for small to medium infrastructures. All the features work very well, and are easy to use. While enterprise customers probably won't get the feature set they require, everyone else should certainly give this product a try, considering its (lack of) price tag!
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