The “cloud” has allowed many IT pros to move some of the more tedious aspects of network management to offsite companies who are responsible for the maintenance and uptime of these services. With Spiceworks, you can use the Cloud Services dashboard to get a quick look at the status of your Google Apps hosted email, Rackspace email, Rackspace cloud hosted servers,Office 365 email, ISP latency, and domain status. You can also keep track of unmanaged cloud services like Dropbox.
How Do I Set Up My Cloud Services In Spiceworks?
Spiceworks should automatically detect what cloud services you have running on your network, but to view, edit and add new ones, you’ll need to access the Cloud Services dashboard. You can do this by mousing over the Inventory navigation link at the top of the page and selecting Cloud Services.
Getting started with Cloud Services
When you first access the cloud services dashboard, Spiceworks should have already determined which cloud services you use and added them to your dashboard. Now, you just need to log in to them.
- Find the appropriate cloud service entry on your Cloud Services Dashboard.
- Enter the appropriate credentials for any services discovered and save them.
Manually add cloud services
If Spiceworks missed any of the services you subscribe to, you can add them manually.
- Click Add Integration.
- Select the cloud service you want to add.
- Enter the proper credentials or domain information and click Save.
Unmanaged Cloud Services
To get the most accurate results, we recommend installing the Cloud Service Scanner” on your Windows devices. This scanner is a WMI provider program that will read from browser history and open tabs on the device, then report back to Spiceworks.Any devices with a Spiceworks Agent already has this.”’ If you’re in a domain environment, download the appropriate version (x86 or x64) and push it to your devices using Group Policy. There are no optional tags, so you’ll just need to run the installer.
Determining what cloud services are checked
There are a lot of cloud services out there. And given that the cloud service scanner can check for almost anything, you can… ummm… check for almost anything. Spiceworks comes preconfigured to check for a large number of services, but you also have the option to edit this list and add more. To view and edit this list, you’ll need to navigate to Settings → Cloud Services. Find the Service List and you’ll see all the services Spiceworks is watching for.
- To disable the scanning of a service, just click the On button to toggle it.
- To add a new service, click the Add Service button. Now you’ll need to give the service a name and write a regex for Spiceworks to use to look for it. If you want to test your regex, http://rubular.com/
is a good place to do so. Some examples:
- A simple regex to check if someone has visited Spotify is spotify\.com
- If you want to only show it if the user is currently logged in, you would use play\.spotify\.com\/discover
- If you want to check if someone has logged in to Gmail or Google Apps mail, you could usemail\.google\.com.*#inbox
- Spiceworks (the company) can add new regex’s to the community and your app will pull these down. If you’ve added one manually yourself, and then we add the same one to the community, both will remain active on your installation. You’ll need to go in and disable one of them.
is a good place to do so. Some examples:
What is the “Watch List”?
The watch list on the Cloud Services Settings page lets you prioritize what services you see on your dashboard. Only 8 services are listed there, so Spiceworks will, by default, show the ones with the most hits. If you want to keep an eye on certain services at all times, you can add them to the watch list. Now this service will always be listed on the dashboard so you can react quicker.
Known Issues
- IE10 is not supported at this time
- The cloud service scanner cannot return open tabs info from Firefox
What Cloud Services Can I Add?
Spiceworks can keep track of your Google Apps hosted email, Rackspace email, Rackspace cloud hosted servers, Office 365 email, ScaleXtreme Alerts, ISP latency, and domain status
Google Apps hosted email
The Cloud Services dashboard on Spiceworks will give you a quick look at your top users in terms of mailbox space used (percentage). You can click the bar at the top of the box to go to a detailed info screen. This will give you the option to see all mailboxes, any timeline activity, tickets, and purchases, as well as add notes and contact info.
You can find out more information here.
Rackspace email
You can see your top mailboxes from the dashboard view of Cloud Services in Spiceworks. You can click the bar at the top of the box to go to a detailed info screen. This will give you the option to see all mailboxes, any timeline activity, tickets, and purchases, as well as add notes and contact info.
You can learn more here.
Rackspace Cloud hosted servers
If you have Rackspace Cloud servers, hopefully you’re taking advantage of the ability to backup your Spiceworks database to it. The Rackspace Cloud integration with Spiceworks lets you see how many backups you have had go to your cloud server and the amount of space they’re taking up. You can click on the service name to be taken to a more detailed screen where you can:
- See any scan errors, alerts and tickets.
- View the cloud servers you have provisioned, including operating system, memory, disk space, IP & MAC addresses, and access to the Control Panel.
- View the backups you have for devices on your network.
- Provision new cloud servers, directly from Spiceworks.
Use the Servers drop-down to switch between viewing your servers and backups.
For more info, click here.
Office 365 hosted email
You can see your top mailboxes from the dashboard view of Cloud Services in Spiceworks. You can click the bar at the top of the box to go to a detailed info screen. This will give you the option to see all mailboxes, any timeline activity, tickets, and purchases, as well as add notes and contact info.
You can learn more here.
ISP Latency
The ISP Latency portion of Cloud Services will show you the latency of your internet service provider over time. Clicking the arrow next to the graph will give you more detailed view.
Domain Services
You can use the domain services option of Cloud Services to keep track of your domain. You can see who it is registered to, the uptime for it, and how many more days are left before it expires. You can use the Edit link to change the Registrar, DNS Provider and Expiration Date. Please note that this won’t change this information with your actual domain provider, only what is displayed in Spiceworks.
