Hands On with Paglo: A Search Engine for IT

One issue that a number of small and medium-sized businesses face when managing their IT infrastructure is keeping tabs on where everything is and what condition it's all in. From the condition of desktops across the organization to the types of servers in the datacenter and what they're all running to the number of mobile devices on the network, IT departments are organizations of any size need effective and efficient ways to gather information about their environment and changes in it at a moment's notice.

Paglo can help. I've been playing with Paglo for the past several weeks since its private beta went public, and I've been hard pressed to find a better tool to collect the wealth of data that Paglo does on all aspects of a business's IT infrastructure. Add to this the number of ways that Paglo allows you to conveniently customize dashboards and reports for ease of retrieval, and you have a service that could make IT executives at a number of modestly-sized companies very happy.

Many IT departments struggle with the challenge of how to manage and collect information about their infrastructure easily. I've been involved with IT departments making the transition between small business to large enterprise, and the task is much more daunting than simply making sure to keep a solid monitoring tool on at all times. It was difficult in the course of reading about and examining Paglo to try and pigeonhole it into a specific type of tool, like a monitoring tool, a configuration management database, an alerting tool, an asset management database. The truth is that Paglo does all of these things, and unlike many applications that try to do too many things at once, Paglo does them all pretty well.

At it's heart, Paglo is a search utility, and through the types of information you can obtain through targeted searches, IT staff can greatly minimize the time required to research and obtain information about their existing systems in order to diagnose issues, track changes, or proactively find problems.

Here's how it works: a systems administrator or engineer planning to use Paglo for the IT infrastructure that they manage downloads the Paglo crawler once the company is signed up with Paglo for service. They install the crawler on their own machine or any other computer with access to the corporate network, and the crawler than traverses the corporate network, collecting information about the company's IT infrastructure and sends it back to Paglo to be kept in the company's repository. Then, authorized users and IT administrators at the company can log in to Paglo's site to begin searching and retrieving information about their company's IT environment in a matter of moments.

The search functionality is where Paglo really shines. Because the crawler can collect a wealth of information about a company's IT environment, and uses a number of protocols to collect its information, you can use Paglo to not just see how many devices the crawler has encountered, but detailed information about those devices as well. For example, the Paglo crawler uses familiar protocols like SNMP to pull configuration data from servers, switches, and routers, so you can tell that the firewall that you knew was there is actually a Juniper SSG 500. You can see with a single search how many servers you have in your datacenter, and the breakdown of which ones are running what operating systems.

It would be one thing if Paglo stopped there, but it goes on to collect more information about the devices and systems it encounters, from firmware information to model and serial information--anything a systems admin may find useful, or an Operations Manager might find important when collecting broad information about their IT environment.

Paglo may sound daunting, but the service is extremely simple. When you log in, you're presented with a search bar and a brief glimpse at your available search index, that can include as much or little information as you like. The test account I used had inventory information, running processes and active devices on the corporate network, and a list of top searches, alerts, and dashboards at the bottom of the page. If, for example, I wanted all of my desktop and laptop users to grab a copy of the newly released Firefox 3 but didn't know how many of them already had it, I could simply type "Firefox" in the search bar to find any and all systems with Firefox in its configuration information. If I read about a vulnerability that's corrected by a specific Windows Server 2003 patch, I can see how many servers are missing it by searching for the patch number. I can even search for "devices by subnet" to see all of the devices on my network organized by their network segment.

As you perform searches that you think you'll do often, you can save those searches as "dashboards" that can be referred to quickly by any corporate user that logs into Paglo. The dashboards are available with one click from the sidebar menu, and the test account that I was given showed useful information like server CPU utilization, free disk space on all of the test company's servers, active alerts, and overall inventory of workstations, servers, printers, and other devices. Being able to access this type of information, like how much free disk space is available on xyz server, is critical to system administrations when trying to diagnose a problem. Being able to see this information easily in one tool without having to physically log on to the server to investigate can save time and energy. Being able to see how much free disk space is available across your entire datacenter however, can be a lifesaver and is critical reporting information for an IT department's internal customers at any business.

In addition to dashboards, you can turn your searches into alerts that will contact critical IT personnel when changes occur in your IT environment. For example, you can set Paglo to notify you when disk space gets low on a critical server, when a switch or router stops responding, or even something more nuanced like when a network printer is out of paper or a certain undesirable application appears on a system on your network.

Paglo offers its software as a service, meaning that Paglo hosts the application and its interface on their own and provides companies access to it for subscription fees. During its private beta, the company managed to sign up over 800 businesses, including universities, hospitals, and construction companies. The service is aimed primarily at businesses of small-to-medium sizes with about 50-1000 employees and IT resources that match up with those people.

The Paglo crawler is completely open source, so as the service gains traction in your organization, you can design plug-ins and add-ons to supplement the crawler's data collection abilities. Additionally, part of the benefit of Paglo offering its software as a service is that you have a broad community of Paglo users to share information with and draw knowledge from. If another company uising Paglo has developed an add-on that scans firewalls for active rulesets, that company can then publish the add-on to the Paglo community where other companies can then download it, use it, and even improve on it and re-post it.

Paglo calls these add-ons and tips "Share-Its," and encourages companies using the service to help each other solve difficult IT questions using Paglo, share their experiences using the service and how it's helped them manage their IT infrastructure, and even post the share-its they've developed for use in other organizations. Best of all, no company-specific data is posted with the share-it, just the add-on itself.

Security might be the only area that might make some companies a little wary of a service like Paglo. Because the service is hosted by Paglo and presented by Paglo to users, and because of the nature of a crawler like the one that collects information about your network and infrastructure and sends it to Paglo, some IT security personnel might need to be sold on the benefits of sending all of that sometimes sensitive technology information off-site to a third-party, even if it makes the environment easier to manage. Paglo makes every effort to keep company specific information private, but that may not be enough for some businesses who simply don't want to risk someone else knowing what they have in their datacenters or what applications their developers use or create. Paglo has no plans to offer their service to companies to deploy in-house, but when I asked about the issue of information security and possibly providing their search functionality to customers in-house, the response I got indicated that the door might be open to that type of offering in the future.

When I had the opportunity to speak to Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Christopher Waters, they beamed about the broad functionality of their service and how valuable the information that Paglo collects could be to IT departments. The goal, they explained, is to provide a service that helps IT departments at small and mid-sized businesses that are often understaffed wrangle and manage increasingly complex IT environments and provide on-demand information about their applications, platforms, and infrastructure. Paglo is in open beta at the moment, and companies can sign up to use the service for free through the rest of the summer.