> Yep I use Spiceworks. It works really well ...

So... Anyone else got an opinion?

Because... well, no offense, John, but I see you joined the day after I asked my question, replied *to* my question and haven't posted anything else since.

Zero friends, no real profile, this is your only Tribe, and... well... the truth is you look at least as much like a shill for the Spice folks as you look like a SysAdmin who's here to help & be helped... No offense intended. I just don't *know* you, and I *have* seen shills try to pass themselves off as "ordinary users".

I figure you may well be genuine in using Spiceworks and not a shill... but I've got no way to tell !


- Steve

> 1) What does the longevity look like for the company running this show?
> To me it looks like it came out of left field and might go the way of the
> great auk as soon as the VC money runs out.

Always possible! FWIW, the domain was registered 9 years ago; could have been a speculator sitting on a "cool" name, of course, with the company that now uses it being just a year or two old.

The thing is free, and appears pretty darned easy to set up & use; not as if it's a grave risk to either your time or your money budget...


2) What are the qualifications of the "experts" that are going to be giving
> you advice? I think you answered that one, yourself in a later post, and
> you were right to be skeptical.

Eh. Even if the guy *WAS* a shill, he was probably a shill from marketing, and not relevant (either positive OR negative) to the tech-support issue.

Also, FWIW, I mostly expect to fix my OWN problems -- all I want from network monitoring is to spot things via automation, so I don't have to
waste my own time with ping/traceroute/etc, checking service-logs, probing ports, looking for disk-full status, yada yada yada....


> 3) What's happening with the data being collected for all those nice
> Google ads?

<heh>
More to the point... what data is going *into* the adsense/adwords/etc criteria? If it's just doing stuff like noticing a given LAN/WAN link that
consistently has 10% & up errors, and popping ads for LAN/WAN diagnostic tools, CCNA/CCNE/etc training, and so on... I'm down with that!

D'you have any reason to think that Google-based ad's are any threat to corporate IP? That they could/would open files (other than the
Google Desktop Search), read e-mail (other than Gmail), etc? Granted that Google *does* scan those products... but why would I (or you) care if Google gives targeted ad's based on aggregate IP traffic & IP errors?

That said, and despite my seeming to "dismiss" your cautions, I have to admit that everything you say is spot-on; it's definitely worth asking Spice about the long-term business-plan, profitability, etc; definitely worth talking to their techsupport/engineering; definitely worth asking about where it gets the data with which to target the ad's...

Here's a few links:
- thelazyadmin.com/index.php
- stupidapp.blogspot.com/2006/1...ng.html
- episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/f...903831
These are just casual mentions, but they seem "genuine" (specially the ArsTechnica one -- the user registered 6ish years ago, and runs a mixed Cacti/Spiceworks monitoring environment).


- Steve