Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

news.ycombinator.com

101–110 of 418 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#101
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a pain. It's annoying to open - if I already have Excel open and try open another Excel document I often have to click into a cell in the currently opened Excel document for the new document to open. It's also a pain closing as it prompts do I want to save. Saving as a CSV is a pain, it takes two prompts to save as a CSV. File recovery is also a pain.

Also you can't open two Excel files with the same name.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#103

Cisco's Duo Security MFA product. It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working. It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.

Huh I have used Duo for years and had no idea they were owned by Cisco. Agree with you though - I don't spend more than a few seconds a day interacting with it, but it gets the job done painlessly.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#104
post #20
post #7

Excel, Box, and Zoom. Would vote for Cloudability as well, but that's not something that I use anywhere near every day.

Excel is a pain. It's annoying to open - if I already have Excel open and try open another Excel document I often have to click into a cell in the currently opened Excel document for the new document to open. It's also a pain closing as it prompts do I want to save. Saving as a CSV is a pain, it takes two prompts to save as a CSV. File recovery is also a pain.

I converted to Apple Numbers about a year after it came out, and both Excel and Google Sheets seem completely archaic to me now. I've sent PDFs of my Numbers docs to people and they are blown away. Now that I can share Numbers through iCloud to both Mac and Windows users, I've got some people fully converted over.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#105

Beyond Compare. I find this tool very very useful when you have lots of integration job. If you have an enterprise version, then you can do stuff like compare and merge files across two servers, compare PDFs, ZIPs, JAR, and obviously plain text files. This is a tool for which I definitely ask for an Enterprise Version license whenever I join a new organization.

Beyond Compare is a life saver. Great choice.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#107
post #16

PagerDuty is generally pretty good, but I haven't used VictorOps or OpsGenie so I can't compare.

In my experience, OpsGenie is a huge improvement over PagerDuty.

I’ve helped manage both PagerDuty and OpsGenie at a certain employer, and while PagerDuty seemed to mostly kinda semi sorta work, there was a lot of klunky aspects to the system. When we switched to OpsGenie, it was like all the things we liked about PagerDuty were still present, but we didn’t have any of the pain points. Moreover, there were additional features that made it even nicer.

Imagine how good it feels when you stop banging your head against the wall, and then realize you’ve been banging your head against a wall for the past few years.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the PagerDuty guys and everything they’ve done as pioneers in this field, but I much prefer OpsGenie.

In fact, OpsGenie is such low-touch that we now have many fewer people who are involved in the day to day management of it, each team can manage the things they really care about, and the rest of us can just get on with our other work.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#108
post #72

Things that we pay for. SQL Server : it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features. Tableau : more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau l…

I definitely am on the opposite side when it comes to Tableau. After you get over the initial learning curve you start to realize that everything in Tableau when working with calculated fields is a workaround. If your data doesn't already look amazing going into Tableau you're in for a bad time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#109

Trace32 & the Lauterbach JTAG. Expensive, but intuitive, scriptable, and performant.

Funny but I had the exact opposite experience with it back when I worked in the space like 10 years ago. The software was clunky and borderline unusable, every bit of the system was proprietary (I remember we had to pay $10K a pop for connector cables, which each came with their own limited license), support was clueless, and there was no ecosystem to speak of (again due to their tight controls).

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#110

Datadog - the amount of observability we have in our infrastructure is insane. I can find out what’s wrong within a few seconds.

-1 datadog. Unless you have an SRE on payroll, it's obtuse, expensive as hell and you can never tell what exactly you're paying for. I don't like it much. It took a LOT of man hours to set up.

Get on the phone with them. I setup regular calls and had them explain each and every charge and where it came from. They would even waive billing on a feature i wanted to try out so i could determine baseline cost. I 100% agree the pricing is impossible to understand but they will work with you to find what works from both an ops and budget.
Post reply on HN