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

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

#301

Post by time0ut »

Splunk is an incredible tool. It is powerful, fast, and just a joy to use. The skill floor is low and the ceiling is high. Only minor complaint is the APIs have essentially no documentation if you want to interact with it programmatically (yes, there is some documentation, but it only covered like 10-20% of the interface last time I looked).

Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they are definitely force multipliers.

I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode, but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better supported in VSCode.

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

#302

Post by user5994461 »

mrweasel wrote: post #121
wenc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain. The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast? Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable to Sumologic. Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some fol…

The minute you say “on-prem” a surprising number of sales people stop talking and just looks terrified. Running and managing an ELK stack is just a hassle and a managing nightmare conpared to Splunk. Humio is a great alternative, if you need something cheaper, but you have to give up a lot of features.

I've managed a full elastic search + graylog cluster. It was very easy to setup and maintain. https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-gray...

By far elasticsearch is the easiest distributed database to setup and scale.

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

#303

Post by user5994461 »

wenc wrote: post #294
gregimba wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what scale is your on premise Splunk? As a member of a team maintaining very large on-prem Splunk service I haven't found maintaining Splunk to be an easy undertaking.

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.

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

#304

Post by time0ut »

davedx wrote: post #200

JIRA. It's powerful, customizable, flexible and drives workflows and productivity across millions of companies around the world. It's the SAP of issue tracking. Despite all the baggage, they still try continuously to improve the UX of the software so it stays relevant and relatively usable. There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger…

I think a lot of the complaints about JIRA are really complaints about the organization. I've seen it model really nice simple workflows and complete insanity. Ever seen a workflow with Done, Done Done, and Done Done Done issue states?

JIRA does have a few technical failings. As you pointed out, its performance can be a problem. Additionally, as a normal user, I find its search lacking. If I want to find the story I worked on 6 months ago that involved adding middle name to the user table, I'm better off hunting through my commit log or my notes than using JIRA search.

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

#305

Post by blaser-waffle »

moooo99 wrote: post #239
mcpherrinm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised that there's not a ton of SAP lovers here, though.

I haven't met a single person in any IT area who usually works with non-SAP products who likes SAP. Even a lot of the people in the SAP departments dislike SAP. The only people are I've met that all love SAP are SAP employees living in my area, which isn't too surprising I guess.

+1. Wish I could make it +10.

SAP is such a pain. Our org got married to it years ago and there aren't budgets big enough to undo it. At least it's stable enough.

Oracle is another ballgame -- they're just terrible.

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

#306

Post by johnwalkr »

GrabCAD. It's free, simple cloud-based version control for CAD files. I don't think they actually offer an enterprise (on-prem) version anymore but I would still consider it enterprise software.

The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval workflows.

Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.

Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:

For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards (which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or dvd).

Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices, such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach a state of no control / word documents.

Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion 360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source world.

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

#307

Post by blaser-waffle »

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?

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

#309

Post by blaser-waffle »

time0ut wrote: post #299
tails4e wrote: post #243

Confluence. It's so easy to organise information and documentation now for technical projects. Of course its free form so people can be messy with it, but done right, and with the good plugins, like draw.io it's really powerful. Integrates very well with JIRA also.

I used to think this as well. But over time, I've seen it devolve into a wasteland of out of date information. This is driven by two factors. First, the search functionality is by far the worst search I have ever seen. This leads to duplicate information as people relearn and redocument things because they couldn't find them. Second, confluence has a very powerful permission system. Once you get past a certain scale,…

Seconded. The search is bad, and Confluence feels unstructured, but with tight security.

It was better than DokuWiki, for sure, but DokuWiki was free...

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

#310

Post by jftuga »

Someone1234 wrote: post #37

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.

I wrote a TCP port forwarder with Duo integration. For it limited purpose, it works well.

https://github.com/jftuga/gofwd

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