One of our customers said: Our small mining operation needed to go from paper based process to digital forms. At first, Google forms allowed us to use this Web-based platform that lets individuals and businesses of all sizes build customizable forms to conduct surveys and generate real-time response charts.
We saw that a small sample of our field workers quickly adopted the new way of working.
Step 1: accomplished.
Now unto step 2.
How do we deploy this unto our whole team? We needed email notifications, offline response collection when without wifi on the field. Our CIO and his director of operations needed deep data and trends analysis as well. Our inspectors, when doing their audits, needed to capture approx. 25 high definition pictures, some audio notes and a video which wasn't really possible with google forms.
So, we can 100% credit the use of google forms to our transition towards a paperless process, but as we navigated saashub.com a little more, we were able to discover a world of alternatives. We strongly suggest to start using google forms before undergoing a big implementation plan towards such enterprise level inspection tools like nspek or even cheaper solutions like prontoforms.
I am not sure if we would start with google's solution first if we would to do this digital transformation all over, but it did allow us to discover it's limits pretty quickly.
At some point, we needed custom fields and functions, and none of us was able to code, so the nSpek training that comes with the application definitely sets it's self apart, giving us full autonomy.
Based on our record, RANCID seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago
Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: about 2 years ago
RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: about 2 years ago
If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago
Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: over 2 years ago
Unimus - Unimus is a Network Automation and Configuration management (NCM) solution designed for fast deployment network-wide and ease of use. Unimus does not require learning any abstraction or templating languages, and does not require any coding skills.
Survey Monkey - Create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically and in real time. SurveyMonkey provides free online questionnaire and survey software.
Oxidized - configuration backup software (IOS, JunOS) - silly attempt at rancid
Typeform - Create beautiful, next-generation online forms with Typeform, the form & survey builder that makes asking questions easy & human on any device. Try it FREE!
GenieACS - A fast and lightweight TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)
Qualtrics - Qualtrics is the most trusted research platform, helping brands make crucial business decisions. From surveys to insights to action.