Spiceworks announced a series of cloud-based applications to help IT professionals learn more about the state and health of their network and solve the IT tasks at hand.

The free applications are easy to find, deploy, and use, enabling IT professionals to inventory network assets, investigate connectivity issues, and spot internet outages within a matter of seconds. By developing purpose-built applications that deliver immediate value, Spiceworks is simplifying the workday for IT professionals.

The new applications are an important step in executing Spiceworks’ vision of delivering an integrated experience that marries social connections and behavior with the tools IT professionals use to get their jobs done. The Spiceworks Community and cloud-based applications will integrate to become more responsive to IT professionals’ needs, smarter about the insights and related content that gets presented, and more adept at understanding the challenges IT professionals are trying to overcome in a given moment.

“Our mission is simple — we want to make the lives of IT professionals easier by giving them the tools, resources, and information that radically simplify their day and helps them get their jobs done,” said Tabrez Syed, VP of Products at Spiceworks. “Our new networking applications will enable IT professionals to spend less time searching for the IT tools they need and more time focusing on strategic projects that help their organizations grow.”

Spiceworks announced the following cloud-based networking applications that can be used as standalone solutions, and will soon be integrated to deliver more advanced network inventory, monitoring, and troubleshooting functionality:

- IP Scanner discovers the devices on organizations’ networks within a matter of minutes, including laptops, desktops, mobile devices, printers, and other IP-enabled devices. The application details devices’ hostname, IP address, MAC address, and operating system. IT professionals can use the IP Scanner to quickly map their IT infrastructure, find missing networked devices, or discover devices that shouldn’t be connected to their network.

- Internet Outage Heatmap pinpoints geographically where an internet outage or service interruption exists and assigns colors to show various levels of latency in regions across the globe. The heatmap, based on anonymized crowdsourced data from IT professionals in Spiceworks, identifies the scope and severity of an ISP outage by revealing if other organizations in a specified area are also experiencing outages. IT professionals can filter the heatmap based on a specific ISP to track the connectivity of their organization’s internet provider in real time, or look at all ISPs to identify widespread connectivity issues affecting multiple providers in a geographical area.

- Traceroute details the internet connectivity path between a device and a specified endpoint, such as a server, application, cloud provider, or internet service provider (ISP). This enables IT professionals to troubleshoot latency issues and identify where a connection is slow or broken. Compared to standard traceroute tools that are often blocked by firewalls on the internet, Spiceworks Traceroute uses a more advanced protocol to provide accurate and dependable results that allow IT professionals to see the entire end-to-end connection path and identify where the connectivity issues are within a matter of seconds.

- Website Down Checker identifies if a website is generally unavailable or just unavailable on a specific network. IT professionals can use Spiceworks Website Down Checker to quickly determine if issues exist on their network, such as a configuration issue, or if the website is down for everyone due to a problem outside of their control.

- SSL Checker helps IT professionals maintain secure web traffic to corporate websites. By quickly detecting common issues with SSL certifications, IT professionals can ensure they’re supporting secure protocols, following the latest SSL/TLS best practices, and keeping their certificates up to date.

Spiceworks recently released additional networking applications, including Connectivity Dashboard, IP Lookup, Port Scanner and Tester, and Blacklist Check, that can also be used as standalone solutions or used together for more advanced functionality.