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Previously, we looked at a quick overview of what and how Spiceworks 2.0 is. In this installment I wanted to take a closer look at the Inventory module and explain a little how we are using it and how it can benefit your Inventory management. Their is quite a bit this module can do for you and to be honest I’m still learning what it’s capable of. However I’ll give you an example of how I used it today. I logged in and went to our inventory page and decided to look at the alerts listed for our deployed machines, I found two of them with dangerously low disk space, and although they probably aren’t noticing too many problems right now, they will soon….

Turns out “ashelby” and “dbest” are getting pretty low on disk space. So I created a call ticket using Spiceworks and will have our desktop technician look at their machines and see if their is anything we can do to limit their gobbling of disk space.

Preventative maintenance is key in turning what could be a disaster into a simple service call!

Now for a larger view of Spiceworks….

To begin with Spiceworks will automatically scan your network for ip addresses and report back information regarding each device. By examining the device it does a pretty killer job of determining what it is the item it’s examining is. Server, workstation, printer, networking device, etc. Don’t get me wrong their are times it’s just straight wrong….it seems to struggle with Mac hardware, however you can easily go in and change what a device is listed at. What you see here is the main inventory page which it has broken down into the different categories of devices. Along with Any errors or alerts for each category that you might want to look at.

The network scan can be customized to ensure that you hit your laptop users while they are in the office, and the speed in which 2.0 completes this scan is impressive over the previous version. It should be noted that we had a few machines that were never in the office that much that caused us some real problems getting them into the system, not to mention our inventory items that are turned off and in a closet! To fix this issue you simply have to enter the information in for each machine manually. Spiceworks keeps a record of the machine based off of it’s SN, so when you bring the machine online next, it will update it during the next system scan but it won’t create another copy of the device.

In addition to all this you can customize what information is listed on each machine. For example here I’ve taken a screen shot of a specific machine “jmadsen.” Of course the system is tracking it’s ip, model, SN, Asset Tag, but I wanted a field for Capitalized so that I could then run a report and see what machines needed to be on my capital budget for any given year. This makes that ugly task of creating your capital budget a snap! So under Settings> Advanced Options I went in and created a custom attribute to track that. Obviously your custom attributes are not going to automatically update during a scan…

So as you navigate down to a specific machine you’ll be able to see any information that pertains to that device. To the right here is a snapshot of the different categories listed under a specific machine. I’ll walk through them quickly to give you an overview of what they all do.

• Events: this category lists any Alerts or Errors from the machines Event’s log, listed by date on a graph and color coded depending on if it’s just an alert or an error.
• Tickets: lists any open tickets this user has submitted to spiceworks. This is a great place to start when a ticket comes in to determine a rough snapshot of their system.
• General Info: the screenshot showing a devices capitalization info is an example of a machines “General Info” tab. this is exactly what it sounds like, general information.
• Configuration: lists their available disk space, Antivirus status, BIOS version and OS Serial number…
• Software: This category shows you every piece of software installed on their system including the installation date and the version. We use this regularly to make sure everyone is on the latest version of some new rollout, or to find out who’s installing “webshots”…bad.
• Notes: Finally, this section simply allows you to enter in information about the machine that you want to track. I’d suggest using this notes section to track details about Warranty information and a history of if that machine was sent in for warranty repairs.

Honestly, this is really just a brief overview of what the inventory module can do. In addition to all this their is even a button for RDP’ing into a specific device! It’s really a one stop shopping for all your inventory.

Let’s be honest, inventory is always a hassle to maintain, things move, you swap out machines to keep your customers running….etc. Inevitably things get out of wack, then you call your Desktop support guy and ruin his week, when you ask him to clean up the Inventory. Spiceworks takes away all of that. Now I said earlier that obviously your inventory items aren’t going to magically show up on your Inventory, so you do have to go around and get that data into Spiceworks, but after that it’s easy as pie.

Last week I said I was going to show you how you could get info to your comptroller in less then 5 min that was absolutely correct. So here is that story, one of our pastors house got broken into. I got the call on a Saturday morning while I was sitting in my PJ’s drinking coffee (bunny slippers on). I opened up my browser went to spiceworks and navigated down to his machine. I clicked the “View complete profile button” and then saved the page as a PDF (I love mac). I then emailed that info to our Comptroller. When she got it on monday, she commented on how quickly we got the info to her, but thought our information might be wrong, because that’s not the information she had in her system (old spreadsheet listing units and asset tags). I could confidently say, “I’m 100% sure that this info is correct, your info is outdated, mine was updated two days ago!”

Thank you Spiceworks! that could have been a headache insuring that the info was correct, and then the scary looks from your Comptroller who is starting to wonder if we have a good idea of what machines we even have in our building….

Next time we’ll take a look at the ticket system within Spiceworks. And how you might be able to increase your IT staff by 200-300%.

IT management, Spiceworks, Inventory