Paglo is a solution for IT guys and gals who have a lot of information to keep track of. Paglo enables IT professionals to search their network of computers to find users, calculate statistics on installed software, and draw charts, graphs and map out your network and it’s devices and computers.As they put it on their site:

Simply put, Paglo is the world’s first search engine for IT. Think Google™ for IT. Use the open source crawler and discover everything about your computers, network and users. And then answer virtually any question before you’re running around
like your hair’s on fire.

After viewing the demo, I am sure that you too will be someone intrigued or impressed.

Another interesting feature is the PQL (Paglo Query Language) language they have. Much like FQL (Facebook’s Query Language), it gives you control over what data you getting and how you want it. This allows IT professionals to share queries with each other and help each other find the best means of retrieving certain data. Open platforms are definitely a plus!

There are some questions that I have not been able to find answers to, though:

• Does on need to install Paglo on every computer on your network? If not, how can it index all of a computer’s software installations without a peer or credentials?
• Does it work with Macs?
• You’re asking companies to trust you with their sensitive data and infrastructure into your own databases?

Those are some questions I’d like to see answered. Other than that, I think that Paglo is going to be a hit or miss type of product. People need to pick it up and it needs to work well right out of the box. Otherwise, people are going to get back to their extremely busy IT lives and hope that something can come and save them the stress, now that Paglo has piqued their interests. I see this as a solution that makesthe most sense in mid to large sized companies, not so much the small start-ups.

Check out Paglo’s official website.

[update]

Chris from Paglo has answered the questions I posed above, and here they are:

1. The Paglo Crawler only needs to be installed on one computer. From there it will connect to other devices and computers over the LAN to collect their information. The crawler needs credentials for these other devices (such as SNMP community strings, SSH logins or Windows domain credentials) so that it can login to them and get the information. The credentials that you enter are only used by the crawler and are not uploaded to, or stored in, the search index.

2. The crawler itself only runs under Windows, however it can collect information from devices running different OSes, including Linux and Mac OS. It is worth noting that Paglo also provides an open API for submitting information to the search index, so it is possible to get data indexed directly from any OS by having a script submit the data directly.

3. Within paglo.com the information about each network is stored completely separately. Your data is not intermingled with anyone elses. The technology for securing online services is now widespread and well understood and there are many examples that show they have great adoption (e.g. salesforce.com, NetSuite, gmail, TurboTax, etc), but we realize that it is not for everyone. I doubt that Citibank will be signing up anytime soon.

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