Product Details
Product Rating
Ecora Enterprise Auditor
Enterprise Configuration Manager
LANDesk Management Suite
LANsurveyor
PC-Duo
SecurityExpressions
Track-It Professional
Two products stand out in this test. First, PC-Duo, which has evolved into a capable, well-conceived product with good functionality and very good documentation. However, in spite of its impressive capabilities, it has remained intuitive in use and attractive in its presentation. It is the sort of product that one could imagine quickly finding favor in a medium-sized enterprise, and is our Best Buy. The LANsurveyor team must also be congratulated for producing an innovative approach to auditing software that not only works well, but has the potential to be useful in a variety of other contexts. The ability to exchange data with other applications has been carefully considered. Administrators and systems architects alike will warm to this software, which wins our Recommended award – it could be an indispensable part of their toolkit.
Auditing tools (2005)
Collecting information about your enterprise's hardware and software assets – and getting quality reports – is more important than ever before. Julian Ashbourn assesses some products that can help
What do we mean by auditing software and why do we need it? These days, the term can embrace a mass of functionality, from software distribution and license management to hardware and software inventory collection and control, and much more besides.
This type of software is useful partly because of the increasing complexity of the typical corporate network, and the software likely to be used within it, but also because such networks are not necessarily the simple, closed-loop affairs of yesteryear. They might encompass remote devices only connected at certain times, devices connected via public networks, and other complications such as wireless connections.
Making life even more complicated is the security patching nightmare coupled to version control and licensing arrangements which seem sometimes to have been devised by the devil.
Indeed, we have become so engulfed by this complexity that some are questioning the value we place upon IT in the first place. Wasn't the goal to make life easier and free up our valuable time for other purposes?
So what can the busy systems administrator do to stay one step ahead of the encroaching mess and restore some clarity and control to the corporate IT infrastructure, especially given the focus on legal responsibilities?
This is where these tools should help, by automating much of the information collection and associated reporting. A task that used to take many hours, if not days, of painstaking examination and investigation can now be done in minutes. Such a task can also be repeated at regular intervals, noting any changes from the last time around and presenting these in a clear way.
Given this connectivity, it would make sense to also use it for software distribution to remote clients, and this functionality features in many such tools. Even a patch management function is increasingly offered with this category of software.
The question is, then, do these things actually work? And are they worth investing in, or do they just add another layer of complication? The answer is yes, they do work, but whether they are worth buying will depend on the size and complexity of your infrastructure, coupled with the overriding culture within the organization.
If you suffer from a meandering infrastructure, where users are inclined to install or uninstall software themselves on a random basis, then you might well wish to use such a tool. If you need to maintain strict adherence to version control and usage by area or function, then such tools can undoubtedly help.
Obviously, they are also useful for inventory and asset management, especially when coupled to good reporting functionality or potential integration with other programs. Many enterprises would benefit from the sort of packages evaluated here.
All these products have merit in one way or another, and provide the functionality claimed. The granularity of retrieved detail, depth of functionality and relative ease of use do vary between products, of course, and we were a little disappointed in some instances with the unnecessarily complicated packaging and installation routines, coupled with equally over-complex licensing arrangements.
Vendors seem to be going backwards in this respect, and are clearly missing the point – that the last thing a busy systems administrator wants is architectural complication, or having to wade through reams of information to understand that the functionality they want is not covered by a standard license.
This is annoying with any software, but particularly disingenuous with auditing products which, after all, are supposed to make life easier. Similarly, products which insist upon the very latest OSs, updates and modules in order to work will not find favor in some organizations, where there can be very good reasons why particular versions are maintained.
In some instances the functionality required a certain amount of messing around by the user to get it working satisfactorily. This is not ideal. We want slick, stable software with intelligently conceived, all-inclusive functionality and intuitive operation. It should feature a streamlined architectural footprint, an attractive interface and unambiguous licensing terms. Some are very close to this ideal – others still have work to do.
But against such comments must be weighed the potential benefits of automated inventory audits and related functionality.
In many cases, these benefits will be real, and the use of such software fully justified.
