Taking over new company

[ChangedMan]

Hey all,
I recently took over a company of 70 users, an AD, exchange 2003, and a file and terminal server.
I plan to do a whole inventory of their systems. What software do you suggest I use? I was thinking of manually use Belarc Advisor to do this. I tried Spicewors and it seemed that not all machines could be accessed even though I was using an AD admin account.
I am also thinking of doing proactive monitoring of the servers and wireless devices (ruckus wireless). I believe your in depth experience in such matters would be invaluable

Thanks for reading !

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Of the "Free" stuff....the best that I've found is LANSweeper.

Your experience with Spiceworks is similar to mine when I tried it....may look simple 'n easy, but in reality..doesn't really work very well. Plus I don't like adware laden tools.

If you recently took over an AD network of 70 users....I'm hoping you have experience and already take care of other SMB networks....so what tools do you use there?

We use N-Able for our RMM package...plop a probe on the network, quickly configure it...let it loose, come back 24 hours later and agents have been pushed to all other nodes on the network, full discovery done, reporting and assets at your fingertips. Some quick tweaks and adjustments in settings..and you soon have your monitoring and alerting all setup. And optional agents are a quick sale away to automate things like updates and antivirus and auditing for you.

 

[nlinecomputers]

If spiceworks wouldn't puke all over wmi it would be a good product. Other tools can scan networks without issues why does spiceworks always have to have you run around to every freaking workstation to get it scan correctly. Garbage.

 

[ChangedMan]

Thanks !

Initially, when I was with my previous company, we did not have anything like this.

So I am to setup the whole monitoring myself.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I will try out LANSweeper.

 

[knc]

I agree with stonecat... I think you should consider an RMM package to monitor and maintain that network. N-able, gfi, continuum or any of the others.

 

[frederick]

Lansweeper is good for inventory. That's about it.

I use Nagios Core, and you can configure it your way to look and feel the way you want. It'll take some time to do, but can be well worth it. You can also program it to do auto-discovery, but one thing I've never liked about autodiscovery is how inaccurate it is. Nagios Core is free, but keep in mind, it's a development, bare minimum program. You will have to customize it to get it to do what you want.

By the way, because this is a program we have to customize, we are actually looking at moving on to another program possibly as the customization is begining to kills us as far as how much time is needed. Open to suggestions on a replacement with real pros and cons.

 

[krtechsolutions]

Lansweeper is good for inventory. That's about it.

I use Nagios Core, and you can configure it your way to look and feel the way you want. It'll take some time to do, but can be well worth it. You can also program it to do auto-discovery, but one thing I've never liked about autodiscovery is how inaccurate it is. Nagios Core is free, but keep in mind, it's a development, bare minimum program. You will have to customize it to get it to do what you want.

By the way, because this is a program we have to customize, we are actually looking at moving on to another program possibly as the customization is begining to kills us as far as how much time is needed. Open to suggestions on a replacement with real pros and cons.

You can't grow like this to much customizing, let someone else be a programmer and focus on being a tech

Plenty of good RMM tools out there to waste your time on open source, don't get me wrong open source products are great.

 

[ChangedMan]

Hi Guys
Just to update you, I have already setup my Spiceworks server. I did a full scan of the network, managed to identify all my printers and my managed switches.
Spiceworks still is not able to scan my Servers and Workstations which to me is the low part of it even when I used my Admin credentials from the AD for the full sweep.

But that is fine though, I manually installed the Spiceworks agent for the servers especially, and everything looks good.

Thanks.