Comments on: Paglo Launches Its Search Engine for IT

By: Minh Duong

Minh Duong — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:28:58 +0000

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.

By: Chris Waters

Chris Waters — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:27:57 +0000

@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.

By: Chris Waters

Chris Waters — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:20:16 +0000

@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.

By: Bjoern Wilmsmann

Bjoern Wilmsmann — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:27:50 +0000

@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.

By: Grant Hutchins

Grant Hutchins — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:02:44 +0000

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

By: bbqdbugz

bbqdbugz — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:19:46 +0000

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?

By: trademanufacturer.com

trademanufacturer.com — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:37:36 +0000

paglo ,for IT,fastly oct 07- dec 07!

By: Vineet

Vineet — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:21:29 +0000

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.

By: le blog à Ollie » Liens du jour

le blog à Ollie » Liens du jour — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:29:26 +0000

[...] Paglo, un moteur de recherche pour départements informatiques. Il ne recherche pas des pages web ou des documents mais se concentre sur les ressources d’un réseau: utilisateurs, clients et logiciels installés. Via TechCrunch. [...]

By: theWilde

theWilde — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:27:40 +0000

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

By: Chris Waters

Chris Waters — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:10:39 +0000

@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

By: don

don — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:42:14 +0000

An IT Search Engine that is Windows Only.

How dumb is that?

By: Michiel

Michiel — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:30:53 +0000

As long as it stores sensitive information about servers any slightly paranoid sysadmin will not want this (and most are more than slightly paranoid).

By: Joke Cricket

Joke Cricket — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:42:58 +0000

looks promising…thanks for covering this.