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Show HN: IT Kit – curated tools for IT managers

itkit.io

39 pointsbenjlang19 comments

I wouldn't trust... most of these... in an IT environment. There's a few gems in there, but IT is such a wide field and the most key element is that you need solutions that fit into your existing environment and existing workflow.

For example, two of the highest rated tools are for Macs. I don't have Macs in my environment. Nor is outsourcing our networking or security to a cloud service a good choice, and I've seen way too many issues with Google accounts to ever consider G Suite viable. (I'd go with any number of alternatives to Microsoft Office long before I'd even consider it.) Chat is a compliance nightmare to add in, and it's outside the workflow of my environment, so everything Slack, Teams, etc. is all useless.

How many of these are PCI compliant? HIPAA compliant? Insert X compliance requirement compliant? (CJIS is a great one to bring up if you want whoever is trying to sell you something on the phone to give up and leave you be.)

Which is to say: My feedback here is that you need to filter for people's needs. We don't cargo cult in IT, I need more than a fancy brand logo.

Thanks, totally valid feedback. Any specific products you'd recommend adding? Or just more advanced filtering?

Two tools I think are great that a lot of people don't know about are PDQ Deploy/Inventory for software deployment too big to do manually but too small to justify buying SCCM, and PRTG is a pretty robust modern network monitoring system.

But yeah, mostly filtering.

I’ve been in the industry for over thirty years, and I’ve never heard of these tools.

I’m not saying that they’re not great at what they do for their segment, but I do think they’re more specialized.

As I said, a lot of people don't know about them. ;) PDQ Deploy is a remarkably affordable software deployment tool, they charge by the admin using it, not by the PCs covered by it, and the yearly cost gets them automatically building for you... most of the deployment packages for common Windows software IT environments deploy. I've never used PDQ Inventory, but it ties in pretty closely with Deploy if you use it as your auditing and asset management tool.

PRTG is in the vein of Nagios and WhatsUpGold, but far more delightful to use.

I wouldn't call either specialized, except perhaps in terms of organization size. If you're in Fortune 500s, probably not going to end up with these tools.

Ahh, right. Enterprisey Windows stuff. The stuff that I have spent my entire career avoiding at all possible costs.

Yeah, you definitely have different answers for these spaces than I do.

For my deployments, it’s either Chef or any of various tools on AWS.

IMO, this comment is very specific to the particular company and/or market you’re working in.

If you’re at a classified government facility, your answers for these kinds of questions will be totally different than if you were at a small tech-savvy startup.

You can be concerned about your security and tech-savvy. But it is true that some of us expect our organizations to be around longer than the three years it takes to either run out of money or get bought out by Google.

Here's what's coming next for IT Kit:

http://people.itkit.io http://jobs.itkit.io

So, this is a website that lets people submit the names of their favorite software and then vote on them.

Anyone want to take any bets on how long it takes to turn this into the latest clicker game?

What do I get if I manage to take my favorite software to a billion votes in the next five minutes? Is there a prize for that? 1/2 ;) ?

Sadly, any time you have user submissions and voting on those submissions, you also have to think very long and hard about all the abuse you’re going to have to deal with.....

Clean design. Making my way through the list, my only complaint about the site is the inability to open each page in a new tab (middle click / right click -> open in new tab). Makes browsing the site a pain.

Good feedback, thank you.

I gotta admit, the very fist thing I noticed was the "This content is not secure" cert warning in the URL bar.

Oops, need to fix this!

Fixed!

So, where is the forum for discussing these tools and making suggestions?

No forum, but you can suggest products here https://askspoke.typeform.com/to/rvq3mY Adding a few each week.

Yeah, I saw that.

After scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page.

Have you tested using this page on iOS?

Yeah, I've seen some scrolling issues which need to be fixed. Anything else you saw?

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