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I often see posts asking how MSP’s can leverage Spiceworks in their environment to take advantage of its features and amazing price point. As a new MSP myself, and SpiceU teacher, I definitely use Spiceworks in my own organization. So this How-to is how I setup my Spiceworks install and use it for my own use and clients. Hopefully this will be of great help to my fellow MSP colleges who are wanting to use Spicworks but not sure how. This document can also apply to others, however, it is designed more as a reference for MSP’s.<\/p>\n
Please note that this how-to is written as a guide not a complete step by step procedure. The reason is because each installation has its own unique requirements and going through each step would take far to much time. Also in order to not duplicate work links to all features, documentation, and plugins mentioned are located at the bottom of this document under the References section.<\/p>\n
As with any application that is critical to a business proper planning goes a long way. You need to decide exactly how you plan on using Spiceworks. Your implementation will depend on how you manage your business and your clients.<\/p>\n
I have a verity of clients that I manage. Some want inventory reports, others don’t. The helpdesk I use just internally for my own time tracking and reporting.<\/p>\n
I’ll now walk you through how I configured my Spiceworks install.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A ticketing system is pretty critical to any business but more so for MSP’s since tracking billable time is always critical.<\/p>\n
Some of the things I do are:<\/p>\n
Links for all the customization and plugins I use are in the References section of this document.<\/p>\n
I also create a separate ticket queues so I can keep Trouble tickets, project tickets, & Change Management Tickets separate. This is all done through ticket views, rules, and custom attributes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Keeping track of a Clients assets as well as their licensing can help you sell your services to them. And helps retain existing clients because they know you are working for them by monitoring their systems.<\/p>\n
I track inventory in a couple of ways depending on client needs and size. For smaller networks I use the Spiceworks Remote Agent. Its quick and easy to deploy for companies who only have a handful of machines.<\/p>\n
For larger clients I install a Remote Collector and have it point back to my install. This gives the client their own helpdesk portal as well as I can control when it calls home in order to keep bandwidth utilization down.<\/p>\n
For my largest clients or for clients that just want their own Spiceworks system I build a system completely separate from my own. This allows them to have their own system that they can manage and work out of.<\/p>\n
Depending on how I deploy the inventory system to my clients will depend on what groups I create for them. I usually have one master group for each client and mange all their assets through it. I use custom attributes to ensure the proper assets are in their correct group. This can take a little work in the beginning depending on your clients network size but well worth it.<\/p>\n
The only plugin I use for inventory is the Dynamic Troubleshooting Action Link. This allows me to link my own tools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
