Contemplating bringing in a solution suite, what is your feedback on kace?
Obviously every service offering out there has up's and down's. I wanted to ask the community what things do you dislike / like about the Kace solution and whether you would recommend it. I would appreciate insight from people whether you are a newly on-boarded partner or have been using them for years. Our budget is pretty tight so I want to make sure my first purchasing decision is strong as this will be my first change in the department I will be making since taking over the reigns.
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Posted by:
h2opolo25
8 years ago
K1000
Agent Inventory works well. There are times the agent gets a memory leak or overloads the CPU though. It's been happening less and less often though.
Distribution and File/Patch sync with remote offices is easy to set up and requires just a shared directory. Been having trouble with files over 2GB though.
Scripting is very useful and is thus far one of the least buggy features of the system.
Patching - It detects patches and deploys them but I just have not been able to find a suitable schedule yet for it. Patches that are released on Patch Tuesday usually show up the following Friday or Monday on the KACE system.
The Service Desk system itself can do quite a bit of what you might want it to do IF you know MySQL. Unless you only have need for a very basic service desk program you will need to write a lot of rules to make things work. There is no way to have fields pop up based on criteria. Also the biggest gripe I would have with it is that there is no database lock or notification for tickets. This basically means that two people can edit the same ticket at the same time.
Reporting - Again knowledge of MySQL is required if you want more complex custom reporting. It is possible to do it though.
K2000
Easy to create boot environments and images for basic systems. You'll need to boot from USB for any UEFI system like the Surface Pro's
Automated deployments are very useful for geographically dispersed companies with a central IT.
Two ways to build your deployment (Scripted Install or Image). From what I've noticed most people use images though.
Remote sites are inconvenient to deploy at the current time unless you do if from scratch because you need to contact L3 support to remove the SSH fingerprint from the VM before deploying.
If you are a Dell house the Driver feed is really nice. Tools are available to get the drivers set up for non Dell systems.
Pre and Post install tasks let you format a drive the way you want or have images join domain, install programs, etc... Very useful if you have a program that is constantly updated and you don't want to redo your entire image every time.
Overall I am much happier with K2000 than K1000. For the K1000 being in version 6.3 it should not have that many bugs and issues with it as it does. Check out the link below to see the "wish list" of what current users are still looking for in the system. Just glancing at the first page of the most voted items should give you a good idea.
https://kace.uservoice.com/
If you do end up purchasing the KACE system, the ITNinja community has helped me a lot in getting things running as close to the way I want as possible.
Cheers!
Comments:
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Typically, Microsoft security patches are added within 48 hours. Other time guidelines can be found here: https://support.software.dell.com/k1000-systems-management-appliance/kb/136902 - jknox 8 years ago
Posted by:
SMal.tmcc
8 years ago
We went with kace over other systems because the cost was much less then any other solution we looked at. We have never regretted this purchase, been using Kace for 10+ years and still going strong.
Posted by:
zookdj
8 years ago
My biggest complaint is that their support desk interface (especially in the latest release) is a pain to use. Work notes can't be entered while you view comments, work notes don't preserve white space (line breaks or tabs), and image attachments are not legible in the ticket page. I've been using it for 5+ years, and it seemed to get slightly worse after KACE was bought-out by Dell.
Their support team is sometimes hard to work with, but once they understand and acknowledge the problem they are pretty good about fixing it, unless they deem it a feature request at which point it goes into a queue and you have no idea when it will be worked on. Their uservoice site is OK, but they take a long time (6-12 months or more) to address requests.
My favorite feature is their agent alert capability. We use that frequently to let end-users know when there is a server outage, etc.
djz
