DELL KACE. Anyone worked with this?

K

kuhla

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 21, 2005
Messages
472
My manager is really pushing us to use KACE but he seems to not know much more than some of us techs (which means we don't know much about it at all). Running into an issue with a lot of duplicate entries. I'm wondering if anyone here has worked with this and can answer a few questions for me.
 
We had our regional Dell reps visit us one day and gave a presentation. We were interested until they gave us a cost quote. :eek:

I've seen others posting that have used it and say there are better options out there. Hopefully they will chime in.
 
If you do a lot of business with Dell they supposedly will toss it in for free. This goes without saying we spent on average with Dell around $500k/year.
 
Mister Natural said:
We had our regional Dell reps visit us one day and gave a presentation. We were interested until they gave us a cost quote. :eek:

I've seen others posting that have used it and say there are better options out there. Hopefully they will chime in.
Click to expand...

Same boat. Awesome concept and platform. The Least Dell could do is at least spit and rearch around before they talk about price.

I'm afraid Kaseya isn't much better when it comes to price.
 
I work with KACE hardware. What exactly are you using? K1000? K2000? What duplicate entries are you referring to?
 
I use KACE everyday at work. What do you want to know? Are your duplicate entries in inventory after you re-name or re-image a PC?
 
Sorry for late reply.

Solhokuten said:
I work with KACE hardware. What exactly are you using? K1000? K2000? What duplicate entries are you referring to?
Click to expand...
Farseer said:
I use KACE everyday at work. What do you want to know? Are your duplicate entries in inventory after you re-name or re-image a PC?
Click to expand...

K1000.

After reimaging a computer, same PC name, same user, same IP, same MAC then install KACE and it gives a new KACE ID causing a duplicate inventory entry. I experimented on a computer and did not reimage, just uninstalled and reinstalled KACE and it assigned it a new ID. Again, duplicate. I have one computer that is listed 4 times (one of which is fine, 3 of which are now 30 days MIA ughhh).

I have had minimal training of any kind in KACE (and my supervisor is almost as clueless as I am) but this seems silly that KACE does not do any kind of duplicate entry checking and just always assigns a new ID every time it sees itself as installing.
 
Why not just delete the old ones? It makes sense that a new build would get a new entry, it's not going to reuse an old one that would completely defeat any sort of accounting. To be honest I would be pissed if it overwrote an old system since I would not expect or want that behaviour.

Anyway good luck if you need support...they are awful. After running a box with a non-working dashboard (causing it to never login, you had to login and then use a direct link to a tab page) from an upgrade for a few weeks waiting for them to get back to us they fixed it but now the language is half german half english. Rather than having the agent brick boxes when you remove or update it we decided to just do stuff manually and not renew the service contract. Once you work with it more you will find all sorts of fancy quirks like if you update an XP machine from SP2 to SP3 with the agent installed it creates a bad init file and opens a thousand windows when you login...
 
Last edited:
mike, is that you? :D I used it briefly in a school district. I found it clunky and unwieldy...browser based is trash management is trashy ;)
 
D-EJ915 said:
Why not just delete the old ones? It makes sense that a new build would get a new entry, it's not going to reuse an old one that would completely defeat any sort of accounting. To be honest I would be pissed if it overwrote an old system since I would not expect or want that behaviour.

Anyway good luck if you need support...they are awful. After running a box with a non-working dashboard (causing it to never login, you had to login and then use a direct link to a tab page) from an upgrade for a few weeks waiting for them to get back to us they fixed it but now the language is half german half english. Rather than having the agent brick boxes when you remove or update it we decided to just do stuff manually and not renew the service contract. Once you work with it more you will find all sorts of fancy quirks like if you update an XP machine from SP2 to SP3 with the agent installed it creates a bad init file and opens a thousand windows when you login...
Click to expand...

That's what I am currently doing, deleting duplicates, but it just seems very unnecessary. If everything is the same, literally everything, then I would really expect something as feature filled and expensive as KACE to at least do a basic check.

KACE doesn't overwrite as it is. It keeps client history. If you uninstalled every other program on the computer and reinstalled them all (except KACE) then it would show that. No accounting would be lost.

All I would want would be for it to match, say, 4-5 variables (pc name, MAC, windows product ID, maybe a 90% equivalent software inventory, I dunno) and then just update an existing record.

Was going to type more but a field user just got a corrupted profile.... yeahhhh.... *groan*
 
I seem to recall that we had the same issue when we first setup KACE. However, I can assure you that what you are wanting for KACE is possible. I'll have to ask around and see what we did to fix that issue. But now, when I image an existing PC, even giving it a new name, KACE re-uses the existing record. You can even look in the history log of the PC and see the name changed.

Don't know if either of these will help, but ITNinja will become your friend:
http://www.itninja.com/question/duplicate-record-of-computers
http://www.kace.com/support/resources/kb/article/Understanding-and-Dealing-With-Duplicate-Machines-In-Inventory?action=artikel&cat=3&id=673&artlang=en
 
We use KACE at the company where I work. Have about 7k computers in the system.

It is great for what it is although it does have it's issues.

AD labels and the report wizard are your friend.

Smart labels are only good for specific instances. They can cause a lot of headache if you try to only use smart labels. AD labels work much better for most things.

Be prepared to do a lot of research and experimenting on AD queries.

Once you figure out your AD queries, and need to make similar ones, duplicate and modify an already made query. It is way quicker to do it this way then to make new queries from scratch.

Once you get into doing more detailed reports, you will want to use the wizard to get a starting point, and then edit the SQL queries directly to get more detailed or limited reports.

Being able to deploy software through it is way better than other options I have used in the past. Make sure to check the "delete download" box in the install configuration or else it will keep a copy of the install files on the computer(s) you push the software to, which just wastes space.

It will take a while to get a good grasp on what it can do, but you will not be disappoint :-D.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top