Ease your network inventory pain with Spiceworks

Inventory

Network device inventory is one of those common pain points that affects every system administrator who has ever tried to script or invent a custom solution. System inventory escapes even the most adept system administrator once the device numbers enter double digit territory. For smaller companies, affordable inventory solutions remain elusive. Fortunately, Spiceworks, the community-driven, Austin-based company, provides a solution free of charge. The founders realized that hardware, software, and licensing inventory was, and still is, a major administrative pain.

The Spiceworks team built the Spiceworks Inventory suite using open source software that includes SQLite, Ruby, and Apache. The spiceworks.exe application is a single, small (66MB) Windows executable file that installs and scans your network devices within minutes of download. Using the Spiceworks' Inventory executable and web application, you can discover any IP-enabled devices on your network, including computers, IP phones, network equipment via SNMP, and printers.

Requirements and Preparation

Recommendations and prerequisites for up to 200 devices include:

A spiceworks.com user account
A dedicated physical system
An Internet connection on the Spiceworks Inventory server
SSD storage
From 4 to 6GB of available memory
An Intel iSeries class CPU
From three to six administrators
Windows 7 or 8.1; Windows 2008 Server/R2 or Windows 2012 Server/R2
A mail relay server to handle email alerts (optional)
A service or user account name and password for all systems

The hardware and software requirements are recommended to provide sufficient performance for handling multiple simultaneous users and for scanning, storing, and monitoring your network systems. It is possible to run Spiceworks on a virtual machine

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