When we discuss improvements to search technology, we tend to focus on the open web while overlooking its more novel uses behind the firewall. So it’s good to point out advancements being made behind the scenes from time to time, even if consumers don’t directly benefit.
Paglo is a Palo Alto-based startup launching a product into public beta today that empowers IT professionals with keyword search. Its crawler doesn’t index documents, images, and other forms of media found on the internet. Rather, it identifies the resources within a corporate or organizational network (such as devices, users, and software) and essentially makes the information available about them Google-able.
Since Paglo is a hosted solution, IT departments need only to install an open source crawler that will send indexed data to Paglo’s servers, where they are held in a designated silo. We’re told the process of setting up Paglo for a given department takes only minutes, after which IT admins can sign in from anywhere to search their networks.
In addition to simple keyword search, users can set up Google Alert-like notifications for when certain changes occur within a network (for example, when memory gets low on a particular machine). Search queries can be saved as tables, graphs or lists and displayed alongside each other on a dashboard for quick viewing. These queries can also be shared through a built-in community with other IT admins who might be interested in seeing how you keep tabs on your resources.
Paglo signed up 800 companies during its private beta period, which started last Fall. The service will remain completely free through at least the summer, after which it will be sold on a subscription basis.
looks promising…thanks for covering this.
As long as it stores sensitive information about servers any slightly paranoid sysadmin will not want this (and most are more than slightly paranoid).
An IT Search Engine that is Windows Only.
How dumb is that?
@Michiel: Within Paglo.com, the information about each company network is stored completely separately. Your data is not intermingled with anyone else’s. The technology for securing online services is now widespread and well understood, and there are many examples that show they have great adoption (such as salesforce.com, NetSuite, gmail, TurboTax, etc.), but we realize that it is not for everyone. It is worth noting too that no passwords are stored in the hosted environment, they only stay within your network.
@don: Actually Paglo will gather all types of IT information, including information from Unix machines, all types of network equipment and directory servers. Right now we have only released the Windows version of the Paglo Crawler, however the Crawler is open source (under the GNU GPL) and with a bit of work can be made to compile under Unix too.
Chris Waters
CTO, Paglo
Yeah.. (not an advertisement–just establishing context). At Splunk we allow people to download and use our product free — Splunk is definitely (a) the first search engine for IT, and (b) quite different than Paglo.
I get the software as a service model, but I’ve found it challenging enough in evaluations to convince people to use Splunk on Amazon EC2–as an alternative to downloading. With EC2, the customer at least as full control over the instance vs. the software as a service model, who knows where the data goes and who controls it. I guess y’all at Paglo will have to prove the security and stability of it. I’m all for SaaS by the way.
Welcome to the party Paglo.
Michael Wilde
Splunk Ninja
thewilde (at) splunk dot com
Another related product that is also free seems to be Spiceworks (http://www.spiceworks.com/). I think they do slightly different things but seem very close in functionality.
paglo ,for IT,fastly oct 07- dec 07!
I am agreeing with most of the above. I have consulted to and been employed by many companies. I think it will be a tough go putting this into a SaaS model. I personally just do not like the idea of having someone having data about my machines. Most of the time I have my own home grown Nagios that I have been working with for years and it alerts me when I need it.
The search functionality is great.
Perhaps we will see this as a subscription model at some point?
Hi, I’m a User Interface Developer at Spiceworks. What I say doesn’t necessarily reflect the company, etc. etc.
I just want to throw out that Spiceworks keeps sensitive network data on your end behind the firewall. Only a few aggregate stats get sent up and are kept anonymous.
Anyway it’s cool to see competition in the space. Hopefully this will result in better software for everyone! And when products are free, users win because they can try everything and even use more than one product if they want to.
http://www.spiceworks.com
@4: I’m just wondering why you didn’t use a platform-independent technology for the crawler in the first place. Even if the crawler gathers information from Unix operating systems as well, it currently still needs a Windows machine to run on. Many IT environments are based on Unix-like OS exclusively or rely on Windows solely for client machines.
Furthermore, as others have already stated, not many heads of IT (I’d even say none that deserve their position) will allow sensitive data to be stored on servers of another company. This does not only include passwords, but things like network topology and machine names as well. A whole lot of a company’s structure can be derived from the network structure, which clearly isn’t something I would want everbody to know about.
I really like the SaaS model but to me it doesn’t seem to fit here.
@10: Actually we did use a platform independent strategy for the Crawler. All of the Paglo Crawler except for the simple configuration UI was written originally on Linux. We have released the Windows version first because, like it or not, it is the most prevalent platform today.
@10: I’d be curious to know if your organization uses any SaaS products like Salesforce, Netsuite, ADP, Successfactors, online banking or whether your employees use online services like Hotmail, Gmail, or IM for any work-related activities. The data that is stored “in the cloud” for all of these services is significantly more sensitive than IT data (note again that the network credentials are not stored online). ADP and Successfactors have information about all employees, their social security numbers and salary information, Netsuite and Salesforce have company financials and customers and sales prospects respectively, online banking has … well the capital you need to run your business.
Contrast all of that with IT data and what should be clear is that the risk with IT data is actually much lower than many applications that large companies are already very comfortable with. That is not to say that the data doesn’t need to be secured very carefully, simply that considering IT data as the most sensitive is an emotional rather than rational response.
I am going to be honest bro, this is the dumbest thing I have seen yet in terms of IT tools. You CANNOT compare services to SalesForce or NetSuite. If they get hacked I lose my sales leads or shipping records but nothing that will floor me and put me out of business. If you get hacked, I am FRAKKED. There is no way bro that I am going to let my entire company’s worth of machines, some of them likely vulnerable to 0-day exploits, be indexed and stored on your start-up servers.
Thanks, but no thanks. Oh my god, and it is windows. And no, I won’t sit and hack the crawler to run on index unix machines.