Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day? • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by luckman212 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

siddharthgoel88 wrote: post #68

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.

The Beyond Compare guys recently finished a big overhaul converting the code to 64-bit. It's an amazingly useful tool that keeps getting better. I love that I can use it on both Mac and Windows and the UI and feature set are identical.

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

#312

Post by user5994461 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

tails4e wrote: post #287

tsss wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to use Vivado once and it was the most miserable experience I ever had with a development environment. Even Haskell has better IDE support. Vivado is super unintuitive, it's slow as fuck, it has none of the basic editing features modern IDEs sport and it has very heavy handed enterprise DRM like you would normally find on CAD tools.

I hear this a lot, but I really don't get it. The ide is very responsive, when you are interacting with a design, exploring structure or connectivity, static timing analysis, etc.. Perhaps you are referring to synthesising RTL - yes thst is slow, but thats much slower with ASIC tools. Synthesis and PnR is a very cpu intensive task, and is separate from the GUI really. I'd be interested in hearing the specifics of wha…

I have to join the other commenters. Vivado is maybe the worst IDE I have used.

We had new projects and interns stuck for weeks because they couldn't figure out how to make a hello world project in Vivado (blink a led for a FPGA dev kit). There was zero doc and zero help available online because it's too niche. This was only unstuck after a while when one senior guy showed how to use it and wrote an internal 50 pages docs on how to create a project and do anything at all. Every single step is an impossible to figure out wonder.

After the initial hiccups, the IDE and the SoC SDK were abysmal. Couldn't store the software in source control because Vivado had no source control support and it was autogenerating/overwriting garbage files all over the place.

To be fair the tool was functional for routing and HDL development. It's usable professionally if you have time to learn and get trained. This may even be good by some embedded development standards (embedded consistently has really shitty development tools that other developers would never tolerate).

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

#313

Post by jlkuester7 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

siddharthgoel88 wrote: post #68

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.

+1 for Beyond Compare! I have tried many different comparison tools and none of them come even close. BC just does it all and does it better than anyone else. File comparison, folder comparison, etc.

My personal favorite is the Git mergetool integration with gives me a three-way merge (with the common ancestor). This is absolutely indispensable when trying to do complex merging and has saved me countless hours.

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

#314

Post by DigitallyFidget » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

blaser-waffle wrote: post #307

DigitallyFidget wrote: post #155

LanSweeper. It's the primary asset tracker/scanner we use for our local network of over 3000 network devices. It can read switch data to even provide a means of finding what port a device is connected to on a switch. Combine with ArcGIS to physically trace thousands of network cables and hundreds of fiber trunks and runs, we're able to have immediate access/knowledge of where any asset is located virtually and physic…

We're running into this issue now. It will be at least 2-3 more weeks of having a cable monkey trace everything in our colo's. How does LANSweeper detect devices? CDP, SNMP, etc?

SNMP mainly. It collects installed apps (versions) hardware info, warranty info, and basically everything you could want or need to know and tons of stuff you probably don't even care about. It has an optional built in ticketing system (for helpdesk) and even a deployment service. I've set up tons of automation with it. Auto install virus scanner on systems, install VPN on laptops, script execution to change Windows USB power settings, and other little things. You can setup groups, filters, reports, search by systems running a specific version of software (and then deploy an update for those systems). It's basically an automated documentation tool with extras that enable a new person to jump in and be able to navigate the company's network to find computers and get to work without having to ask where everything is. But that also helps for the people who have been there for years to not have to go through and document things. Honestly the ability for it to trace through the network connections is probably the most game changing powerful feature. And you can even use it to execute backup scripts on network switches.

It's enterprise and comes with that price tag, but the cost of it is covered by the labor hours it saves.

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

#315

Post by user5994461 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

seneca wrote: post #69

adrianbordinc wrote: post #5

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

Datadog is nice as a user. It's pretty terrible as a person who cares about the budget. Their pricing is pretty ridiculous at times and their sales people are often way over aggressive. You have to pay extra for containers on a host. They also make it impossible to keep users from consuming additional paid features. I like having Datadog when I need to debug, but I'm pretty sick of the dark patterns and surprise bill…

Agreed that the downside is billing and their sales are asshole. I learned to be insensitive to pushy sales when negotiating for software, it's the same shit with half the suppliers. The tool is really great though and worth paying for.

I dread having to go back to Prometheus because the company is too cheap to pay for proper tooling (datadog) and developers would rather write their own time series database for their resume.

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

#316

Post by user5994461 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #78

adrianbordinc wrote: post #5

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.

I have to object on the lot of man hours. This was by far the easier thing to setup compared to all the competitors and the open source solution we have. Maybe a week or two to setup everything on all our hosts and capture all the metrics for systems and AWS and databases and custom metrics.

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

#317

Post by user5994461 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

siddharthgoel88 wrote: post #64

adrianbordinc wrote: post #5

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

The tool indeed does a very good job from developer's point of view but when we see the end to end aspects of Datadog then the feeling changes. Previously when I was working as a DevOps Engineer, I remember how much our Head of Infrastructure was pissed with the shady licensing and pricing model of Datadog. Missing of detailed itemized billing, lack of proper access control (allowing who team can use which feature, c…

Yep, the access controls are limited. Can't finely controls who can raise alerts to where for example, so it's not "enterprise" in a sense because enterprise is all about tightly controlling what the peons can view and do.

In my experience alerting often came down to some departments trying to push some shit to some other departments. I personally avoid working in monitoring/alerting for that reason, it's just human problems and dysfunctional organizations, nothing any tool can help with.

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

#318

Post by wenc » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #303

wenc wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 server install of Splunk Enterprise. Less than 150mb a day ingest. We installed it over a year ago and haven’t touched it since, aside from updates.

A typical small deployment is more like 150 GB a day. No wonder you have no issues at that incredibly small scale.

Oops wrong number, 1GB a day, not 150MB.

Yes, it's not big. But that's all we need.

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

#319

Post by user5994461 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

aprdm wrote: post #42

user5994461 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on datadog. It's crazy how easy it was to setup and cover all our infra (AWS, ELB, postgresql, cassandra, kafka, haproxy, nginx, etc...). The tool paid for itself with the infra optimizations we could find in the first month of usage. It makes me sad when I'm forced to work with graphite/prometheus/grafana in my newer company. These can't gather half the metrics and their charting capabilities are so bad in compar…

Can you expand? As someone who maintains a large-ish prometheus/grafana installation on prems I don't know what we're missing! We have a couple of custom metrics that we developed in prometheus and the OSS plugins/dashboards look great.

Datadog has incredible integration with clouds (AWS and other), databases (postgresql, mysql, cassandra) and middleware (haproxy, kafka). It can capture all the metrics from all these out of the box with minimal effort, whereas you have to crawl hundreds of broken plugins for prometheus to get one third of that.

If you're using clouds (AWS/Azure/Google). Datadog can capture all the AWS metadata automatically and merge with existing metrics, so you use instance tags and such for searching and filtering. It can also capture AWS metrics like ELB and S3 usage which are hard to get otherwise.

So you simply get all the metrics you need and get them easily (I appreciate that people who haven't worked with these probably can't fathom what they are missing out). There are defaults charts/dashboards that are quite good and available out of the box, whereas grafana is empty out of the box and you're once again forced to crawl for dashboard plugins.

Last but not least. The capabilities to search and visualize in datadog are incredible. To draw any metrics and combination of metrics in different ways and analyze usage. Prometheus can't chart shit. Grafana has limited charting and you're forced to create a dashboard to make one chart, which can't be done because don't have admin permissions.

By the way prometheus doesn't scale. It can reach 1000 or 2000 hosts top and that's the end of it. I've operated it at the limit, some operations get really slow and we had to cut down on tags and some metrics to avoid crashing.

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

#320

Post by finnthehuman » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Microsoft Outlook. Seriously.

I can list gripes for days, and I wish thunderbird would integrate with all the features of exchange better, but I don't know how anyone gets by work with webmail. I feel such a lack of control in my personal gmail box.