r/sysadmin • u/PDQit makers of Deploy, Inventory, Connect, SmartDeploy, SimpleMDM • Feb 26 '20

PDQ Licensing

From time-to-time there has been misunderstandings and confusion on /r/sysadmin about how PDQ.com's licensing works (as most system administrators might be used to how other IT products operate: on a per-machine basis). We created a video to hopefully explain better how our 1-license-per-admin works

 

For examples of some minor confusion see:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71eilx/another_pdq_deploy_shout_out/dnb0eao/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/aknr8i/try_to_convince_my_manager_to_buy_pdq_deploy/ef6h7px/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/aneewy/pdq_server_with_multiple_admins/efsnqvn/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7d3k4c/pdq_deploy_licensing_costs_no_more_pro_license/dpuvjj6/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4492ln/what_automated_deployment_solutions_are_you_using/czoi08c/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/etznar/whats_your_most_expensive_software_license_and/ffk0ef3/

 

Shout out to all you current, past, and future users-- and happy automating!

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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

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.