Spiceworks Network Monitoring Tool
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Hi everybody
i plan to to use the free spicework network monitoring tool but i get annoyed by those ads in the right side of the dashboard, from those who use this free tool in ML, how do you experience those annoying ads especially if you have a non IT manager who consider those ads as malwares and know nothing about spicework, how i can persuade him that those ads has nothing to do with affecting our corporate network.
best regard
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Well they are ads like any other. Does he consider all ads malware? I'm not sure how to address someone who is confusing advertising, which is everywhere, with malware. That's a pretty basic computer literacy task. Does he feel his television in "infected" if he sees ads on television? What about in a newspaper or magazine? What about billboards or ads in store windows?
I'm not sure how to approach him on that as it is such a normal thing to have ads like that. Maybe have the exact conversation that I list above. Does he consider all ads malware? How does he react to ads in other places?
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You can, of course, block the ads.
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Or you can reverse the question... make him explain what his concern is. Force him to explain what he thinks is happening when a website shows an ad. Often if people try to explain irrational thoughts it will all break down for them. But most people, being irrational, will simply refuse to explain, which is its own problem.
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there is a big difference between ads on external website and ads running on a monitoring tool that can scan your whole local network. non IT people when they see something that is inside the network and further more running on a local server, they will automatically think that this monitoring tool scan the network and maybe send your private network information to external parties, especially if they never heard of spicework
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because spicework is famous only to IT people not to everybody
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recently ads become a synonym of malwares, they've got a bad reputation to IT and non IT people
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@IT-ADMIN said:
there is a big difference between ads on external website and ads running on a monitoring tool that can scan your whole local network.
No, there is not. You are looking at a website, NOT the monitoring tool itself. It's just a website pulling the ads from the web like any other.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
non IT people when they see something that is inside the network and further more running on a local server, they will automatically think that this monitoring tool scan the network and maybe send your private network information to external parties, especially if they never heard of spicework
It does send private information out, but that has nothing to do with the ads. The ads are just ads.
This is no different than seeing ads on Facebook or any other website that someone views at work. Do they feel that those ads are "inside the network?"
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@IT-ADMIN said:
because spicework is famous only to IT people not to everybody
I don't think that that is a factor here. This is just ads. If you don't know Spiceworks at all, you would just think that it is a webpage like any other. It is only by knowing too much about Spiceworks that people begin to add in assumptions that are not true.
Show Spiceworks and Facebook or Infoworld side by side. Both are webpages in a browser, both have ads.
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@scottalanmiller said:
This is no different than seeing ads on Facebook or any other website that someone views at work. Do they feel that those ads are "inside the network?"
but facebook is running outside my local network, it is a server somewhere in US i don't care but spicework would be a local server, did you understand what i mean
the fact that i have ads on my server, this shows that i'm exposed to the internet
running something locally is not supposed to retrieve any ads from the internet, this is my point -
you can't compare facebook which is running on an external server with spicework which is a monitoring tool running locally
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when you run something locally you want to feel secure, and the security to us is being not exposed to the internet, but when we have ads that mean we are exposed to the internet (retrieving ads from internet) this give us the impression that my server is exposed to the internet
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@IT-ADMIN said:
you can't compare facebook which is running on an external server with spicework which is a monitoring tool running locally
But the ads are not local, the ads are just from the website, not from the monitoring tool or internal. The Spiceworks interface is just a normal webpage.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
the fact that i have ads on my server, this shows that i'm exposed to the internet
Ah, this is the issue here. There are no ads on the server. The server isn't showing any ads. Your web browser is looking at the public website spiceworks.com for the ads. The server is not involved here.
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Keep in mind that the ads pay for Spiceworks, you can opt to pay for Spiceworks via the "MyWay" program and have the ads turned off.
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dear scott did you tried nagios before ?
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@IT-ADMIN said:
dear scott did you tried nagios before ?
Yes, although not very much. It is very complicated but very powerful. Before looking at Nagios I would check out Zabbix. Zabbix tends to be much more preferred by people in the SMB market.
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It took a while, But I think you two finally landed on the same page.
Spiceworks gets it's revenue from selling your data to vendors and showing vendor ads to you.
But I do agree that some manager who might be given access to SpiceWorks might think that their server is the one serving up these ads, or that their data is sitting on someone else's server and that server is serving up ads to them, neither case is desirable.
But as more and more things go cloud/hosted based, the potential for others to read/use/etc our data to their own means (take Google and email for example).
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just the trade off you pay for free software.
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Not that Nagios isn't great, Nagios, Zabbix and Zenoss are all good options.
If you want to investigate, @Lakshmana has recently implemented a working Zabbix system. He could give you a tour of what he has done and could even help you implement it. I know that he is recently out of work (quit a terrible job) and would love if you were able to hire him for a few days to do a Zabbix project for you
