Spiceworks

We actually have a ton of system management and monitoring tools running around at the office, like MOM and some of the GFI stuff.  The one we seem to keep coming back to is Spiceworks.  It’s the most competively priced (Free) of them and it actually provides a ton of features and a fairly decent reporting interface.

Spiceworks can monitor any number of different things, such as disk space, up time, event logs, pings and so on.  Especially on Windows boxes, it has some great inventory capability, and I often use the installed software reports to make sure the user base isn’t installing verboten items.  The reporting interface is alright, there are a few things I wish it could do a little better (some of the queries are hard coded, unless you want to write the SQL yourself) and it has limited me in the kinds of reports I wanted to run.

There’s a good sized user community, and is updated very frequently as well.  A number of things I’ve taken issue with in the past (such as duplicate machines) tend to go away in future releases.

The free version is ad-supported, but actually runs on your own hardware, so your intimate network data isn’t sent to the mother ship.  For shops that take exception to the ad-based scheme, there is a fee-based version that removes all the ads.  Either way it’s an excellent choice for a smaller shop with limited resources (that’s pretty much every small shop I think).