5.0 release includes new configuration management capabilities and enhanced mapping
Whether working at a large enterprise or small company, time typically isn’t on the IT staff’s side. Consider industry estimates that routinely place upwards of 70% of an IT department’s time spent on basic, “keep the lights on” tasks. That leaves little productive time to focus on the innovative projects that will help boost the business.
“The biggest limitation I face as an IT professional is never having enough hours in the day,” agrees Justin Davison, systems engineer at RJ Lee Group, a Pittsburgh-based materials analysis company with 250 employees at five offices around the country. “Anything that lets me do more, with less time, means I can do my job better.”
Better yet is when that “anything” happens to be free, Davison says.
To help alleviate management chores, Davison, like one million other users, relies on free IT management software from Spiceworks. And Spiceworks, in turn, continues to add zing to that software. For example, this month it announced an update that provides automated network configuration management capabilities.
In particular, Spiceworks 5.0 provides three new capabilities, two for network configuration management tasks and the third for network mapping. For configuration management, the software now offers automated network configuration monitoring and backup, which lets users automatically scan and back up configurations for switches, routers and other network devices; and network configuration change management and restore, which alerts users when standard and approved network configurations change and then allows remote restoration of proper configurations using a built-in Trivial File Transfer Protocol server.
For network mapping, Spiceworks has upgraded the software’s capabilities to include the ability to diagram network bandwidth and traffic information for individual endpoints, be those desktops, servers, network-attached storage devices or other gear. With the enhanced network mapping, IT managers get more detailed performance, bottleneck and overall health information, the company says.
Spicework 5.0’s ability to automate switch configurations will provide particular relief for the RJ Lee IT team, Davison says. With all other tasks it must contend with daily, checking switch configurations “honestly gets forgotten more than remembered,” he adds.
RJ Lee has been using Spiceworks for several years. Davison says he initially brought the tool in for conducting inventory and asset management and now also uses it for the helpdesk, too. “Our usage just keeps growing,” he says, “and if these latest capabilities are anything like what Spiceworks has released over the last two years, I am confident they’ll be done well and be seamlessly integrated.”
The Spiceworks 5.0 beta is available for download from the company now.
