A Google Earth for your network? - Paglo, interesting idea, but could go places?

Recently I have been doing lots of work in the area of asset management. Its a pain in the ass but it is necessary for any business to carry it out especially after a period of growth.

At the moment I am using the excellent Novell ZENworks Asset Management software. I’ve used many asset management solutions over the past few years. Some were great at windows, some at UNIX based systems, but some just plain weird and crap (I think Dell just acquired them *cough*). I won’t go into the wonderfulness that is ZAM (like Unix and Windows management), go and download a free trial for yourself, its not difficult to setup and runs itself quite well with little interaction required.

But ZAM is not the subject of this post (although I must admit to being converted to it). While I was digging around, I cam across an especially unique and interesting product called Paglo.

Basically according to their blurb, they wish to become a Google for your IT systems. They are currently busy developing the open source Paglo crawler, that once it is installed on your systems, discovers all there is to know and feeds the data back to a personalized secure page for you to view.

While the idea is great, and must be commended, there is one drawback I can see to it. I under no circumstances would part with the number of devices, device types, network layout etc with another third party unless it is necessary to the running of the business, and only then under strictly confidentially and supervised conditions. How secure is Paglo? Will my details be safe? What are they going to do with the data? For me there are too many questions to be asked before I could have complete confidence.

However that being said, for smaller organizations or for more liberal minded individuals, it may be a option. Just to be safe, I have signed up for the beta and I will unleash it on a lab network just to see how it works and performs.

One big thumbs up to the company behind Paglo is the fact that the crawler is open source.

I am looking forward to this new innovative approach and maybe talking with their team a little, so when I do, I’ll pop a post on it then.