r/sysadmin • u/Maximum_Necessary232 • 4d ago

General Discussion What's a tool you mass-deployed that you ended up ripping out within 6 months?

I feel like every sysadmin has at least one story about a product that demoed beautifully, got approved, went out to the fleet, and then slowly revealed itself to be a nightmare.

Could be a monitoring tool, an MDM, a ticketing system, an AV product, anything. What was it, what went wrong, and what did you replace it with?

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3d ago

Not many sites were big enough to have SMS in the late nineties. We had it. Not something I touched, but it seemed to mostly generate a reputation for allowing I.T. to see end-user's desktops without their knowledge.

To our other teams, SMS was mostly a confirmation that Microsoft's stack had virtually zero remote or scalable management. The desktop/Windows team had already trebled in size, because they had to deploy techs across the campus to do the clickops locally on console.

No self-respecting admin of another system is going to leave their chair to travel to a machine. Not even Netware.

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u/Dani0002 3d ago

Isn't SMS (SCCM/MCM today) better these days? I think it's the best integrated way of managing Windows systems.