Spiceworks Reviews

My primary use is for documentation and monitoring the vital services.

My biggest need for using a network monitoring system was to track activity and find out what I've actually got out in the universe. When I came here, I had absolutely no documentation on this network whatsoever, and that's an 875 node network.

I have found a couple of features to be valuable. One, it shows the users that are currently logged in, which is not something that Active Directory by default will ever let you know upfront. It's something you have to craft a script for and it's kind of a pain to have to do it every time. If I just want to quickly look and see who's logged on to their machine Spiceworks will tell me that. That's a very accurate and easy way to find software inventory of every machine that's out there. I do have a Microsoft Configuration Manager Server here and that will work okay. But Spiceworks definitely gives a much broader overview. The SCCN machine on the South Room Inventory and Compliance might tell me some of the other software that's on. For example, I've already caught several world-class operators here in our work environment putting the software on their machines that should not have and it was documented and they were disciplined because of it. I would say policy enforcement is definitely one of the bigger features overall that this solution gives.

The network mapping could be improved. Putting together an actual, bonafide network map would be really nice. I've been messing around with their Google Map snap-in that they've got and that's great if I've got a massively corporate Enterprise Scale Network with branch locations in 50 different cities around the U.S., but I don't. I have an 875 square-mile Indian reservation that I have to keep an eye on. And the mapping that they've got there doesn't even come close to being usable to me. 

So if they could implement a little bit better GIS-based mapping, I could take a Google Earth image and zoom right down here on my 875 square miles. And I could show the links, I could show the nodes, I could show the switches, routers, et cetera. And everything else in between. But I don't have any tool that is capable of mapping the way that I need to map this network.

It doesn't have some of the integrations I'd like to see, some of the ticket generation alerts, things of that nature. It does alerts, but it tells us when stuff is down and when it comes back.

I would also say that a faster network search engine would be good. When it does device discovery, that really takes a long time. It took me two weeks to get everything that I imagine is in the network onto that. Because, like I said, I have no documentation into this network and what I've been able to find is I've got 1,375 DHCP leases out there. Half of those are desktop phones, another 200 or so are probably cellular phones or WiFi devices that connect up. And then I have about 575 actual devices out on the network and those are things that Spiceworks has all been able to tell me. But the time it took to do that discovery was quite lengthy. 

I have been using Spiceworks for about a year and a half.

Overall, the stability is fairly decent. It's pretty good. I've got some reservations about how any resource you click on goes out to the Cloud. I could also do with the UI advertising being a little less. I've inadvertently clicked on several of the ads thinking it was going to show me some value-added feature within Spiceworks and I get bounced off to some other place, but that's not what I want. And I am a bit emotionally triggered and pissed off because of it because it's wasting my time and it's not what I want.

As the Interim Director of Information Technology, I am the only one using it.

I've got an IT Department of 10 technicians and I've had a couple of folks look at it, but I think I'm probably its biggest user.

I've never used support.

The initial setup was a bit time consuming, but it was fairly straightforward. It was about 90 minutes to run through the setup on just that product alone. That's not including the time it took to stand up the server, load the OS, get the drivers and updates and all that done. It took 90 minutes to load just Spiceworks.

It's a pretty good product. I like it. It's given me some fairly valuable information that I've needed on a couple of occasions that no other product would present to me.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably give it a seven, based on the fact that it does give me some information that nothing else has. But the pain points like the length of duration for the discovery, the GIS mapping, the ability to map is kind of lackluster takes the three points away.

We use Spiceworks for IT ticketing. The main users are me and my staff, which includes two other people. We serve about 60 or 70 other people who submit tickets via email. They don't use Spiceworks to monitor how many tickets they have open. For the most part, they don't go to that page. They just send in their tickets and wait for us to respond. Since we're a smaller company, then the response time typically isn't too long.

Using Spiceworks, I was able to set up notifications. So, if the drives were getting full or something like that, it was helpful. Ticketing works really well. We've set up an email address where employees can send their requests. It creates a ticket automatically and sends it to me and my staff. We can then go see what the problem is and resolve it.

And we have some rules set up in there. If one of those rules is triggered, then it automatically sends an email. It tells us we need to look at that email. so that we can determine whether or not it's safe to go ahead and let through things like that are very helpful in keeping us able to serve our users.

When I first started using Spiceworks, it really increased visibility. I have some other stuff that I'm using now for that kind of visibility, but at that time I went with Spiceworks because it was free. I set it up and used it for visibility in the network, then we set up the ticketing stuff several years ago as well. That works well for us.

It lets us know whether devices are getting out of date and tracked warranties. Spiceworks also gave me visibility in terms of what software was installed on each device and its status. I could see where it was on the network as well as the versions of operating systems and stuff like that.

In terms of visibility features, there was one thing I didn't like about Spiceworks. Once a device was recognized on the network, Spiceworks never got rid of it even after you took it off the network. You had to go in and manually remove it. That's the case on the version that I'm running anyway. If a computer gets connected to the network and then you replace it with something else, it still hangs out in there. This makes it difficult when you're looking for stuff or wanting to check on something. You've got all these old stuff out there that you have to filter through, and I just don't have the time to manually maintain that.

I've used Spiceworks for seven or eight years.

It's stable. It's well developed and the maintenance is pretty simple aside from having to go in and take out old devices. But you don't really have to mess with it to keep it running. Every once in a while something will glitch up. I just have to restart it and it works fine. This only happens maybe once every six months. 

Usually, if I have to restart it, it's because the server that's hosting it has shut down and it didn't restart correctly or something like that. The servers reboot periodically, so sometimes it doesn't come back up cleanly or whatever and I restart it. But for the most part, it's pretty maintenance-free when it comes to glitches and stuff.

We have 14 virtual servers and a workstation with around 80 to 100 laptops, so the scalability is good for a small business. I don't know how well it would work in a large corporate environment, but we're a relatively small business, so it works well for us.

I don't remember ever having to contact Spiceworks technical support.

Setup is pretty easy. You just install it and connect it to your network. It goes off and did its thing. I did it myself in one afternoon. It's pretty simple to maintain. We don't have somebody who administers it. I and another person pretty much keep an eye on it. 

The free version of Spiceworks that I'm using is a good solution if you don't have any other options for visibility into your network. I haven't looked at a paid version. I didn't actually know there was one. 

My biggest advice to people thinking about using Spiceworks would be to stay on top of managing their devices. The version that I'm running doesn't clean that up for you. The visibility solution that we use now removes a device from the list if it doesn't check in within a specified period of time, so it doesn't have a lot of deadhead stuff out there. It tries to maintain an accurate current list rather than just allowing everything to stay there forever until you manually remove it. I don't know if a newer version takes care of that or not. Or if there's the setting that I could have set up to take care of that,

I would rate Spiceworks seven out of 10.

Spiceworks is for the IT guy that wants to monitor systems that he doesn't have a managed service partner behind him. And that's where Spiceworks has a really good place.

The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free. Monitoring of printers for low toner. Finding machines that have low memory or low hard disk space. This is a nice thing to have. I think it's getting better at discovering network equipment.

There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution. So you don't get near the quality of discovery versus something that's got an agent on it. It's not really multi-tenant, in the sense that you couldn't use Spiceworks to manage multiple clients from the same console. I think if they had a paid subscription for the support it would be nice. I'd rather pay so much per asset per month to be able to pick up the phone and call them.

I have been using Spiceworks for ten years. I know it very intimately.

I think we did have some trouble, but it was not really the fault of Spiceworks. It was more the way that we reconfigured our firewalls and ports, so it couldn't discover the many things. And with all this stuff going on with ransomware and stuff like that, it's going to be challenging for all of those companies to be able to browse a network, including your network equipment, but not allowing any ports open. It's kind of difficult.

It is pretty easy to expand so it is very scalable.

That's another downside with Spiceworks. You can't really call Spiceworks. You can go to the community and you can ask questions, but you can't pick up the phone and call a number. I'd rather pay so much per asset per month to be able to pick up the phone and call them.

I looked at about 10 different systems, Lansweeper being one. SysAid, Samanage.

Very easy to setup, download the install file, it determines the IP range and away you go.

No, the last install I did of Spiceworks, which was for a customer, they're running it no problem. It's self-sufficient.

The cost could be recouped within a few months. I resolved a very critical issue a client was facing after doing a major "non-roll-back" upgrade, comparing working system vs non working systems we were able to determine the a IE patch was causing the issue and through to tool were pushed out the new update and resolved the problem within a few hours. Without SpiceWorks all 300 systems would have had to be touched. 

I have used a product called SAManage and implemented it at a number of clients and it worked really well.

So Spiceworks would have an even more market share if they had a paid subscription model because you could turn off all the advertising that pops up all the time. But I think in general, I would give it a seven on a scale of ten compared to some of the other mid-tier stuff.

We're using Spiceworks mainly for infrastructure monitoring.

Spiceworks is generic and free.

Since Spiceworks is a free tool, it's not very scriptable or customizable. 

I've used Spiceworks for two years.

Spiceworks is stable for our purposes.

Spiceworks' scalability is fine. Our usage has been moderate and we have five admins managing the solution.

I haven't contacted Spiceworks tech support. But support isn't readily available. They probably send you to a third party, so we really haven't pursued support for it. Spiceworks could add paid support as a service.

I would rate Spiceworks four out of 10. Just because it's free and out of the box, and you get what you pay for, and you didn't pay for it. So, not getting much. All right. Know what you're getting because it's free.