SMBs should use Spiceworks for patch management, ticketing system, Knowledge Base Articles, user portal, and Zabbix integration.
Spiceworks Review – Why Should SMBs Use Spiceworks?
Trusted by more than 280K IT pros worldwide. 14M+ tickets created annually.
Easily find and create how-to articles that can be kept private, shared with fellow admins or displayed to end-users in the user portal. When creating a new KB, you will now be asked whether you want it stored on the Spiceworks Community or locally in your installation.
Patch Manager Plus
Patch Manager Plus is an all-around patch management solution that offers automated deployment for Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints. It also provides patching support for over 900 third-party updates. It features customizable patch management policies, insightful reporting, and other security enhancements.
The tool’s robust reporting allows organizations to comply with various data security standards and benchmarks. Its intuitive interface makes it easy for IT teams to use and manage.
It can scan for patches on multiple devices, including desktops, laptops, servers, roaming devices and virtual machines. It can also detect and report on vulnerabilities across the network. It also supports an extensive list of third-party applications, such as Adobe, WinRAR and Skype.
Moreover, it can create a test device for each patch to run on before deploying it in production systems. This feature enables administrators to ensure that the patch works properly before it’s deployed. It also lets them roll back to a previous state if they encounter any problems after deploying the patch.
Knowledge Base Articles
The ticketing system offered by Spiceworks is free of charge. This makes it a popular choice for IT professionals with limited budgets. It also includes other features that make it an excellent choice for SMBs. The software is easy to use, and it provides the basic functionality that most IT pros need. It is simple enough for beginners to use, but it also has the basic feature set expected from any IT help desk system.
The Knowledge Base Articles feature in Spiceworks allows you to view articles hosted locally or in the Community. You can toggle where you want to view articles by changing the KB preference in the Settings menu.
You can also publish an article to the user portal or add a link to it in a content block. Then, the article will appear in the “Suggested Results” list when end-users enter tickets with a similar topic in the user portal. You can also share articles with other IT admins and the community in general.
User Portal
User portals are the key to giving your customers a great self-service experience. They decrease the number of service requests that go to your help desk, saving you time and money. They also give your customers control over their own needs, which can be particularly useful in travel and hospitality industries or in B2B settings, for example, where customers might want to check the status of a reservation or make simple changes to their account.
When users access the user portal, they enter a STA single sign-on (SSO) session for applications. Their SSO session is bound by the same SSO timeout rules as other STA sessions.
When device users log in to the self-service user portal, they see a tile view of the applications they are authorized to access. They can click on any application to open it. The list of applications they can view is determined by the application assignments configured in STA. They can move applications to their favorites list.
Zabbix Integration
Spiceworks is a pretty self-contained application. You can install it on a decommissioned server, a spare desktop, or a virtual machine. The system does not depend on many components of the OS, which makes it great for an IT pro.
Once the software is installed, it will create a local database and configure all modules and application components. This process may take up to 30 minutes depending on the resources available on the machine.
In addition to its own internal monitoring tools, Spiceworks integrates with other IT management systems to help you triage alerts from diverse IT components. This is a good way to avoid outages and downtime.
The system also offers a webhook integration to send Zabbix alerts to a Teams channel or team. To set up the Webhook integration, go to Admin >