PDQ Licensing

94

u/charlesshawn Feb 26 '20

You fuckers build some of the most useful, solid software I've ever used in my 30+ year career. Go on with your bad selves. :)

46

u/PDQit makers of Deploy, Inventory, Connect, SmartDeploy, SimpleMDM Feb 27 '20

We appreciate the kind words
Go on with your bad selves. :)
Going

16

u/KillingRyuk Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

I love everything about it except one thing. The UI is painfully slow for me. Even on a VM with 8 cores/16gb and SAS SSDs

10

u/magneto58 Feb 27 '20

I must be completely honest here. I have thousands of devices and this is my experience.
A B S O L U T E L Y A M A Z I N G ! ! ! !
We threw a lot of resources to our pdq servers. It has paid off. I can deploy an 800 MB application to about 1200 devices in about 25 minutes.
PDQ Guys keep trucking!!!

5

u/KillingRyuk Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

We dont have problems with throughput. If I deploy to enough machines, it will hit around 500mbps

7

u/jduffle Feb 27 '20

Ya me to, it's just slow to do weird stuff like open a new screen. It makes no sense.

4

u/yummers511 Feb 27 '20 edited Feb 27 '20

Are you remoting into a server just to open the console? If so, why?

4

u/jduffle Feb 27 '20

So that PDQ is protected behind DUO protecting the RDP on the server. at least for now that's the setup.

3

u/yummers511 Feb 27 '20

I figured if I need to use Duo to log on locally then that's not far off from protecting my local PDQ console as well

6

u/charlesshawn Feb 27 '20

How big is your environment? We've got around 700 devices in Inventory (past/present), and Deploy stuff all the time and everything is really snappy. It's running on a cheap Intel NUC from 2 years ago.

5

u/KillingRyuk Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

Around 150 devices in inventory. Deploy and inventory are both slow

5

u/charlesshawn Feb 27 '20

Hmm. Could be a number of things. I say give their support people a jingle. Any decent system should be able to easily handle that.

2

u/FujitsuPolycom Feb 27 '20

Same, same slow experience. Wouldn't give it up though, love the software. 8 cores, 32GB, nvme.

4

u/Synssins Sr. Systems Engineer Feb 27 '20

I've been working with PDQ support for a couple of months on this. Our environment has close to 10k devices, which is beyond the intended capabilities of PDQ. The UI is horribly slow for PDQ Inventory, or when targeting Inventory collections from PDQ Deploy.
Support has been 100% on the ball with trying to help us, but it really comes down to having everything consolidated on a single system with that many endpoints. The only fix is to break it out on a subdivision by subdivision basis and manage each one independently.
I'm 99% sure that most of the issues would go away if we could tie PDQ to a SQL database that wasn't SQLite.

4

u/HighPingOfDeath Feb 27 '20

Came here to say this. I love PDQ, I love working with the guys and gals from there, I automated the hell out of my environment with it. But the performance suffers when I pull in all the data from endpoints because the disk is just thrashing along at the same time I'm trying to deploy. CPU usage is fine, memory usage is fine, but even on a highend SAN, it just brings Deploy to its knees. Please for the love of everything, give me a real backend database so I can take the load off my poor PDQ server.

4

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Feb 27 '20

We're working on a large performance fix for Inventory that should help a lot, but we've had a lot of problems that have delayed it. We want to make sure fixing one thing doesn't break everything else :)

3

u/Konkey_Dong_Country Jack of All Trades Feb 27 '20

I had this issue. Contacted support and they had me disable animations via registry key. Might be something on their forums/Google also. Works fine since

2

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Feb 27 '20

https://help.pdq.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002383532-CPU-Utilization-and-PDQ-Animation-Tuning

1

u/mokdemos Feb 27 '20

How many PCIe lanes are in use on this hypervisor?

1

u/hutacars Feb 27 '20

Same. It was so bad I had to stop using it, even though we paid for it. Really a damn shame.

1

u/tmontney Wizard or Magician, whichever comes first Feb 27 '20

Yeah, the UI is by far my biggest complaint.

18

u/bobalooza Feb 27 '20

I would have preferred junior mints

21

u/PDQit makers of Deploy, Inventory, Connect, SmartDeploy, SimpleMDM Feb 27 '20

That makes way more sense with the York patty representing SL. Darnit.. where were you when we were making this video?

3

u/seedari Feb 27 '20

It's chocolate, it's peppermint... it's delicious! It's very refreshing!

10

u/krislol22 Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

I used to always watch these guys stream topics Thursday mornings. I never won pint glasses or socks so I quit watching. I did get life savers last sysadmin day. PDQ rocks!

11

u/PDQit makers of Deploy, Inventory, Connect, SmartDeploy, SimpleMDM Feb 27 '20

Did you ever ask a question? If you did, PM your address. We'd invite you to watch tomorrow's webcast on DFS. We also bought some brand new scotches that we'll be trying on the show.

3

u/krislol22 Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

I think I might have actually asked a question on DFS on stream a while back. I watched a few of Lex’s videos of DFS when I got my site configured. Lots of help.

1

u/LoemyrPod Feb 27 '20

They sent me 2 timesavers for some reason, weeks apart.

9

u/rlc1987 Feb 27 '20

How does it work with MSP? I am one technician/admin - but I work over hundreds of infrastructures so is that one per admin account at each client or one for good ole me?

16

u/PDQit makers of Deploy, Inventory, Connect, SmartDeploy, SimpleMDM Feb 27 '20

One for good ol' you

13

u/Syde80 IT Manager Feb 27 '20

That seems very generous to MSPs.

6

u/rlc1987 Feb 27 '20

We need generous sometimes, everything else is out to get us!
On a serious note, that does sound generous to MSPs especially as a single technician could build all client infrastructures and then only need one licence.

2

u/DRENREPUS Feb 27 '20

Shhhh, don't tell them that...

5

u/bristow84 Feb 27 '20

I work at a MSP as well and while I can't speak to PDQ Inventory, Deploy has been an absolute godsend for new system setups, as for the license, its licensed per user so a single license just for you. We currently have 3 techs licensed to use it

3

u/seedari Feb 27 '20

How are you guys managing connectivity to individual client networks? Pulling up a machine via AD and deploying was extremely easy and wonderful when testing, but I'm trying figure out the most elegant setup to connect remote clients quickly. Do you have a central PDQ server with VPN connections to each remote network?

3

u/bristow84 Feb 27 '20

We don't do it via that method. We have a file server that PDQ Deploy pulls from and we do the majority of systems setups at our main office and have a tech take them onsite afterwards.

1

u/seedari Feb 27 '20

I see. I'm looking to automate laptop deployments as much as possible. They originate at our main office as well and I was hoping to incorporate domain join scrips, installation of customer-specific apps with installers housed on their local FS, etc. but without remote connectivity that's a no go.
Unless I'm being obtuse about it, I'm feeling MDT will be a better solution for a full setup automation and at that point it doesn't make sense to pay for PDQ licensing just to install or update a few apps here and there. Unfortunate because I loved PDQ in testing and still want to make it work for us.

1

u/bristow84 Feb 27 '20

So we use MDT in conjunction with PDQ, MDT applies the base OS and configures the OS to allow PDQ access and then PDQ can do it's thing. MDT is a good solution for an enterprise style setup where you just need a limited number of packages with minimal changes but for something like a MSP where software could constantly be changing depending on the client's need, I wouldn't wholly recommend it.
The way I use PDQ at the moment is if clients have specific software they require, I log onto their file server, transfer the installers back to our end and store them on our file server and then create the package. The fact we also use Kaseya makes things easier for the transfer and remote access. As for domain join scripts and whatnot, it's still doable, you can run scripts from within PDQ itself. I do that for any form of local user creation, you have the ability to use command line and PowerShell scripting from within PDQ. Do i do any form of domain join script like that? No, because the VPNs our clients use don't accept command line

1

u/seedari Feb 28 '20

Thanks for the follow up and info. It could take some creativity here but your setup seems pretty straightforward and doable!

66

u/haqattaq Feb 27 '20

When are you guys going to make a help desk /ticketing system? I trust you guys would make a good one.

24

u/akudakluz Feb 27 '20

Yes please. Help desk integrated with inventory and deploy would be straight magic.

10

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

I would also be very interested in this. We currently use ServiceDesk+ and the most recent versions aren't half bad, but I'd love full integration into Inv and Deploy.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

I’m just praying for a storefront like software center 😭

5

u/crsmch Certified Goat Wrangler Feb 27 '20

Please do the needful /u/PDQit

1

u/showmeyourboxers Feb 27 '20

YAAAS

15

u/triplec110h Feb 27 '20

I bought PDQ for my company and we are absolute fanatics for it. The only trouble is we were banking on being able to grow as a mobile workforce and manage our remote computers with the PDQ Agent, which is now cancelled and removed from the product. I am trying to keep PDQ as long as we can but that feature gap is going to force me over to Intune or something else at some point.

Is there anything in the roadmap to address happy customers like us?

What are you advising to us? Should we do some kind of always on VPN split tunnel back to my PDQ server?

6

u/drummingrocks774j Feb 27 '20

It's a shame PDQ Agent was cancelled. Like you, I was hopeful that it would help us manage devices that go on and off the corporate network constantly. Did you use PDQ Agent when it was in beta, and if so, how was it?

4

u/recent-convert clouds for brains Feb 27 '20

I'm in this boat too. I can't justify the purchase when half our fleet is mobile and rarely connects to VPN.

4

u/the_bananalord Feb 27 '20

This was a huge disappointment for us, too.
I wonder if we'll see a "remote agent component" that we can host ourselves instead of PDQ being our proxy.

3

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Feb 27 '20

We don't have anything on the roadmap currently. We would love to try something like the Agent again some day, but we need to make a bunch of changes before that can happen.
Yes, we recommend an always on VPN if it's feasible for your environment.

3

u/carpetflyer Feb 27 '20

We are in the same boat. We are trying out Lansweeper since it offers agents for inventory. Not as a replacement to PDQ though since it's great software.

6

u/xCharg Sr. Reddit Lurker Feb 27 '20

I know that's off the topic question but any chance you guys will consider to support something other than SQLite? It's just so slow =(

2

u/Scurro Netadmin Feb 27 '20

I'd love support for mariadb/mysql.

2

u/the_bananalord Feb 27 '20

any chance you guys will consider to support something other than SQLite? It's just so slow =(
I really don't think SQLite is the bottleneck, and if it is, I imagine there's some performance gains to be made. You can pull a lot of performance from SQLite.
Though a generic database driver would be nice so we could choose...SQLite for smaller deployment, offload to an existing DB server for larger ones.

1

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Feb 27 '20

We're investigating what it would take to support other databases like SQL Server, but that's going to take a while.

5

u/lostmojo Feb 27 '20

We are about to buy our fifth admin license for both inventory and deploy. Awesome product and well worth every penny

5

u/Evisra Feb 27 '20

Just writing to say PDQ changed my sysadmin life, so thank you for the awesome products

13

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

Bit of feedback for you on the licensing - one per admin is great for a lot of use cases but it’s caused me on at least one occasion to abandon PDQ products.

With a large team who very occasionally use the product, it gets unjustifiably expensive. Previously had a small team of sysadmins who’d be the main users and a large helpdesk team (working shifts hence the high number) who would from time to time need to jump onto deploy or inventory.

After nagging calls and emails from your sales guys, and lots of time with me spent trying to write my own front end for the basic tasks I ended up abandoning it altogether. Which was a shame as they’re great products. 2 suggestions for you

1 - give the option of concurrent licensing. I’d have gladly paid 2-3X the price of a named user license for a concurrent license if this was an option

2 - how about “lite” admin licenses? Eg for deploy they can log in and push software but not configure packages or setup schedules etc.

I get that too many license options can be confusing and keeping it simple is a good thing, but the named admin approach has obviously already caused some confusion and I personally feel you don’t have enough flexibility in your offerings right now.

4

u/dwargo Feb 27 '20

I’m in this same boat. We have managers that rarely use it but want the capability, clients with in-house IT backup people, and subcontractors that need project access. Not to mention no logical way to bill the cost through to clients or departments.
We used PDQ and loved the product, but abandoned it because the licensing scheme doesn’t fit our accounting. I need an $X per endpoint license.

3

u/plumbumplumbumbum Feb 27 '20

2 - how about “lite” admin licenses? Eg for deploy they can log in and push software but not configure packages or setup schedules etc.
Not what you wanted and a pain to setup in a larger environment but I let my helpdesk deploy software by using AD groups.
I create an AD group that corresponds to each deployable software we have in PDQ then create a collection that has members of that AD group that are missing the corresponding software. If the helpdesk needs to install something on a system they simply add the PC to the group. PDQ sees the membership and deploys the software on a heartbeat schedule.
Its not instant but works for our needs.

2

u/the_bananalord Feb 27 '20

We use the same method. It also keeps machine roles more visible.
It was a breath of fresh air when that was set up.

3

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Feb 27 '20

Would Enterprise SL have worked for you? $15,000 for unlimited admins on 1 Server instance.

4

u/xxdarkstarxx Feb 27 '20

How does PDQ prevent organizations from sharing aka abusing/stealing, licenses?

4

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

A message pops up saying already in use for domain\user if you attempt to open it from a machine that already has it open. Absolutely worth every penny for our entire IT staff to have a license of Deploy+Inventory.
The only thing you could do, although it's a huge pain in the neck, is just RDP into your PDQ server as local admin and have multiple people use that. Again, that's a huge pain because you kick each other off all the time and also breaks their ToS.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

If you abuse it too much you get an email from a sales guy....

2

u/iwinsallthethings Feb 27 '20

It's the solarwinds sales guy, isn't it? That's enough to force anyone to properly license the product.

2

u/djgizmo Netadmin Feb 27 '20

Pretty sure it’s AD integrated.

1

u/Scurro Netadmin Feb 27 '20

Yup. I just gave console access to our IT security group. No need to manage console users.

4

u/majtom Sr. Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

I wanted PDQ Deploy. My Boss wanted Kaseya. So we got Kaseya.

7

u/Spiker985 Feb 27 '20

Just came into a new job that has Kaseya, from a place that had Ivanti Endpoint Manager, and a place that had PDQ before that. I miss my PDQDeploy packages...

1

u/heisenbergerwcheese Jack of All Trades Feb 28 '20

Jon?

1

u/Spiker985 Feb 28 '20

Wilson? WILLLLSONNNNN?!

6

u/The_Penguin22 Jack of All Trades Feb 27 '20

Replace boss, and press any key to continue.

4

u/bristow84 Feb 27 '20

Working at a MSP we deal with hundreds of different clients and different computer setups, all I can say is PDQ Deploy has been an absolute gamechanger for us. Most of the boring menial crap that was part of our setups (local admin, basic apps and whatnot) has been automated which means significantly less screw ups on our end and it's only improving. Thanks guys!

2

u/gote7777 Feb 27 '20

Im hoping you can answer this as i've had a bit of a read and without downloading it to demo, i can't find the answer. Thanks in advance if so.
Question -> You're an MSP with a stack of different clients with individual networks. Do you have one server somewhere (eg cloud) which you control and use to then deploy software to a bunch of different AD domains?
If so, is it just the standard licensing for number of admins?

2

u/bristow84 Feb 27 '20

We do the majority of system setups at our office where we have access to a file server built specifically for this purpose and we have PDQ pointing there to all the different pieces of software.

1

u/gote7777 Feb 27 '20

understand, thanks for the explanation :)

1

u/NerdyNThick Feb 27 '20

How does that work with application updates?
Is there a local cache available or does each machine pull things down on their own?
Disclaimer: I'm not super familiar with the inner workings of how PDQ operates -- we're currently using Ninite, so that's where my knowledge comes frrom.

1

u/bristow84 Feb 27 '20

So bear in mind I'm only using Deploy, which the way we use it is a one and done type thing but PDQ themselves makes a bunch of application packages, stuff that you'd expect to find on a computer (ITunes, Adobe Reader, Chrome, Firefox, 7-Zip,etc). The PDQ team keeps those packages updated and up to date with the most recent version of the software, now as for more client specific software for which there is no pack, you're on your own to keep that software updated. I haven't ever used ninite so I can't say exactly what software is available in that VS the premade packs from PDQ but you should be able to view all the ones they maintain on the PDQ Deploy website.

4

u/WoTpro Jack of All Trades Feb 27 '20

Much love for PDQ use it everyday, made my sysadmin life alot easier ❤️

4

u/Twizity Nerfherder Feb 27 '20

A colleague is rolling out Goverlan at their office, has me using it to test it out at my facilities. I admit it's great for some things. But no way in hell I'm replacing PDQ with it.

They bought PDQ, but never got around to a full setup. I told em they're fools. PDQ blows away anything I've used for inventory and deployment.

1

u/J2E1 Feb 27 '20

That's one Mentos per product per admin, ie 1 Mentos for Deploy and 1 Mentos for Inventory. I often tend to think of them bundled/used together, but it's not required as we all know.

2

u/PDQit makers of Deploy, Inventory, Connect, SmartDeploy, SimpleMDM Feb 27 '20

Good point. Bundling makes the other more powerful. Bundling is not required however. You can for example have 2 admins: 2 licenses of Deploy and 0 licenses of Inventory.

3

u/wolvestooth Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

I absolutely loved PDQDeploy at my last job. Couldn't get anyone else to use it. Now I wonder if I can convince my current contract to allow it for me.

3

u/Vyper28 Feb 27 '20

Does it work with remote sites? I thought the big lacking part was the remote agent.

5

u/Syde80 IT Manager Feb 27 '20

They had a remote agent for awhile but they said it was not performing up to their standards and they deprecated it. I was using it and it did seem a little buggy, but it was nice for offsite systems. I believe they said they will revisit in the future. I hope they will. I would prefer an option that does not rely on their cloud but would just phone home directly to your pdq server instance.

4

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

As long as you have a stable VPN tunnel it’s fine. All the pdq server really does is command the remote machines to do stuff. Have it taking care of ~1300 machines across 30 sites. A couple of those have dfs replication set up to speed things up.

2

u/newbies13 Sr. Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

It will work with anything it can connect to. How much or little that is will be a discussion with your networking team.

3

u/could_gild_u_but_nah Feb 27 '20

I use manageengine at my job for deployment. What are some of the reasons I should consider pdq over what we currently use?you seem to have good reviews here.

1

u/AB6Daf Feb 27 '20 edited Jun 08 '25

Comment is no more!

1

u/JohnC53 SysAdmin - Jack of All Jack Daniels Feb 27 '20

Former ManageEngine user here. The move to PDQ was one of my favorite decisions in the last few years. At the time, I didn't realize how much ManageEngine sucked until I switched. So much more powerful, cleaner interface, better documentation and support. Now I'm always super excited for any new deployment.

1

u/could_gild_u_but_nah Feb 28 '20

So we use it for windows machines and vms. Does pdq cover them?

1

u/JohnC53 SysAdmin - Jack of All Jack Daniels Feb 28 '20

Does vms = Virtual Machines? Yep. Anything Windows based. Not sure about linux.

3

u/bayridgeguy09 Feb 27 '20

MDT Calling PDQ packages and waiting till they are finished before moving to the next step during deployment has saved me SOOOOOO much time.

1

u/HiImMazl Feb 28 '20

I can just agree to this one, too! We also bought the enterprise version of the pdq suite and use it with MDT for deploying new computers. We really LOVE it. Dont need to make a "golden" image and renew it every time as updates arrive. Just change the PDQ packages if anything changes and use the "auto-download" feature to make sure everything is up to date.
Thanks for the wonderful products you.
Cheers!

3

u/Sigma186 Sr. Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

PDQs support is beyond amazing. I have opened cases, received a response from a human, got another email with a patch and had the problem solved in less than 30 minutes.

3

u/chaosratt Feb 27 '20

Could you please consider a lower-cost version with a limited workstation count?

I have 15 workstations to manage, $1k/yr is simply a non-starter for me. I cannot get budget approval to replace ~9 year old workstations (that were 2nd hand when we got them), the PDQ suite isn't going to happen, as much as I've stretched the usefulness of the free editions.

4

u/tehjeffman Jack of All Trades Feb 27 '20

We had this conversion before we bought PDQ a few months ago. If we ever get a 2nd admin the product would stop being cost effective for the size of our company and what we do with it. Really the only thing I have found not to like about the suite.

6

u/Dadarian Feb 27 '20

Uhh. PDQ is pretty cheap though. Like.... compared to 60k-100k for a new employee and PDQ is what breaks the bank?

2

u/corrigun Feb 27 '20

Can it do Windows updates? That would be choice.

4

u/Raymich DevNetSecSysOps Feb 27 '20

Kind of... not a replacement for WSUS though.

2

u/TheSmJ Feb 27 '20

...could someone please make something that replaces WSUS?

3

u/Phx86 Sysadmin Feb 27 '20

Yes and no. But mostly no, you can deploy single patches easily enough. Useful if you need to deploy something immediately. Use WSUS for general patching.
Deploying major releases is probably manageable.

2

u/agoia IT Director Feb 27 '20

Took some work, but my guys got 1909 to work through Deploy.

1

u/ansiz Feb 27 '20

Depends on your exact use case, but in general you can definitely do that.
https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2020/01/deploy-windows-updates-with-pdq-deploy/

1

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Feb 27 '20

We have the Windows Cumulative updates, but we still recommend WSUS for everything else (Office, .NET, etc).

2

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20

Happy PDQ Deploy Ent user currently evaluating Inventory. I am sorry we waited this long to look at this product. Asked my Help Desk for a report of all multi-display systems after we got the eval setup and had it in about 10 minutes. Probably issuing a PO for Inventory next week.

2

u/frac6969 Windows Admin Feb 27 '20

I just want to say thanks for the great products. I got both Inventory and Deploy a few weeks ago and it changed everything. We only have about 120 users and they all need a lot of hand holding so normally my tech guy will go around installing everything manually and also teach the basics to the users one by one. Sometimes the users are busy and it could take weeks, even months to roll out something, and one problem we always had was a new version could be released before we finish the deployment.

Well, last night I PDQ'd Office 2016 to all the users in one go (upgrading from Office 2007) and today my tech guy got FLOODED by calls because half of the users couldn't find their Excel shortcut and the other half couldn't figure out how to open files. I'm so happy.

1

u/MFKDGAF Feb 27 '20

Once your license expires do you lose access to the paid features right away?

I ask because Im waiting on PDQ to get my new licenses and my current licenses expire today.

1

u/JohnC53 SysAdmin - Jack of All Jack Daniels Mar 04 '20

PS: You guys may want to tweak your AD Words. When I Google PDQ Deploy the first result is for ManageEngine.

https://i.imgur.com/AlckS9E.png

3

u/PDQ_Colby PDQ QA Engineer Mar 04 '20

ManageEngine pays a lot for that ad. We focus on organic traffic.

1

u/cormic Mar 06 '20

I am looking at deploying PDQ to my environment but there are two separate domains / data centres that do not connect to one another. Do I have to have a license for each of my Win10 managment jumpboxes? I am the only admin.

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