
Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day? - bonfire
A few days ago there was a discussion about worst enterprise software. What is the BEST one?
======
wenc
Things that we pay for.

 _SQL Server_ : it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans,
clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features.

 _Tableau_ : more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good
multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize
multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R
(ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff
around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with
your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of
Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though
I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though,
especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to
think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a
certain mindset is required.

 _Active Directory_ : it's just there. It's pretty decent.

 _Visual Studio_ : I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C#
codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS
Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of
the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g.
solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a
ton of guards to help avoid human errors.

 _Splunk_ : it's good. Not the cheapest though.

~~~
milani
Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?

~~~
wenc
For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain.
The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast?
Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's
also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable
to Sumologic.

Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a
database. Some folks will recommend elasticsearch, but we tried it and it was
challenging to set up just right.

~~~
mrweasel
The minute you say “on-prem” a surprising number of sales people stop talking
and just looks terrified.

Running and managing an ELK stack is just a hassle and a managing nightmare
conpared to Splunk. Humio is a great alternative, if you need something
cheaper, but you have to give up a lot of features.

~~~
user5994461
I've managed a full elastic search + graylog cluster. It was very easy to
setup and maintain. [https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-
gray...](https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-graylog-
lessons-learned/)

By far elasticsearch is the easiest distributed database to setup and scale.

------
PeterStuer
Surprised by the answers given here. If I hear 'enterprise', I'm thinking SAP,
IBM, Oracle. SAS etc., not some dev environments or niche tools.

~~~
GoblinSlayer
Yep, RHEL would be an example of open source enterprise software.

~~~
fizixer
Borderline. The 'E' in RHEL doesn't imply RHEL itself is an enterprise s/w,
more that it's an OS best suited for 'running enterprise s/w on'.

------
adrianbordinc
Datadog - the amount of observability we have in our infrastructure is insane.

I can find out what’s wrong within a few seconds.

~~~
siddharthgoel88
The tool indeed does a very good job from developer's point of view but when
we see the end to end aspects of Datadog then the feeling changes. Previously
when I was working as a DevOps Engineer, I remember how much our Head of
Infrastructure was pissed with the shady licensing and pricing model of
Datadog. Missing of detailed itemized billing, lack of proper access control
(allowing who team can use which feature, can publish what metrics, etc.)
makes the tool a pain in the long run. We even started to look for affordable
alternatives to it.

~~~
acid__
Yeah, amazing, incredible tool but the billing is obfuscated to the point you
almost wonder if they're intentionally trying to make it impossible to
understand. Though once you realize there are a tons of hacks to abuse their
billing methods and pay much less, it becomes apparent that it's just a case
of Hanlon's razor.

------
kristopolous
I've tried not to be impressed by airtable, but their on the fly API
documentation generators for how you configure things still feels like black
magic.

Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I
believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations.

They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them
somehow

Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digital ocean. They clearly have
developers who rely on the product. All the elements are there and they work
well.

Azure's python libraries I find way easier than AWS's boto3, which for some
reason always reminds me of dbus programming. I keep meaning to try Google's
bud I haven't yet.

I also have been meaning to write one that somehow transparently uses things
like rsync/scp with some partitioning strategy so you can migrate say a
personal project costing you $50/month, generating you $0 and used by only a
few dozen people to potentially a lot less.

(I've got numerous large scale efforts that _almost_ nobody uses...)

~~~
iamwil
what is an on the fly API documentation generator? Is it that you say what
your lang and stack is and they tailor the documentation to just the lang and
stack you're using?

~~~
hiyer
Airtable generates basic REST APIs for CRUD operations based on your database
schema. Perhaps that's what OP is referring to.

~~~
rochak
That sounds about right and even makes sense. I would really like to work on
something like that, maybe even open source.

------
Someone1234
Cisco's Duo Security MFA product.

It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as
MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just
does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working.

It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.

~~~
paxys
Huh I have used Duo for years and had no idea they were owned by Cisco. Agree
with you though - I don't spend more than a few seconds a day interacting with
it, but it gets the job done painlessly.

~~~
rgrs
Acquired by Cisco

------
pinacarlos90
1) Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 2) SnagIt 3) SSMS 4) Microsoft Azure Services
5) Microsoft Azure DevOps 6) Postman

there a bunch of other tools I use/love but I'm not sure they would qualify as
'enterprise', but here they are just in case:

VScode, notepad++, Agent Ransack, code compare, Dark reader chrome extension,
Fork (git-client tool for MacOS),linqPad

------
DigitallyFidget
LanSweeper. It's the primary asset tracker/scanner we use for our local
network of over 3000 network devices. It can read switch data to even provide
a means of finding what port a device is connected to on a switch. Combine
with ArcGIS to physically trace thousands of network cables and hundreds of
fiber trunks and runs, we're able to have immediate access/knowledge of where
any asset is located virtually and physically as well as the entire physical
path between each point. These two tools have allowed us to migrate from
knowledge only being saved in the memory of a few individuals to being
preserved via documentation.

~~~
blaser-waffle
We're running into this issue now. It will be at least 2-3 more weeks of
having a cable monkey trace everything in our colo's.

How does LANSweeper detect devices? CDP, SNMP, etc?

~~~
DigitallyFidget
SNMP mainly. It collects installed apps (versions) hardware info, warranty
info, and basically everything you could want or need to know and tons of
stuff you probably don't even care about. It has an optional built in
ticketing system (for helpdesk) and even a deployment service. I've set up
tons of automation with it. Auto install virus scanner on systems, install VPN
on laptops, script execution to change Windows USB power settings, and other
little things. You can setup groups, filters, reports, search by systems
running a specific version of software (and then deploy an update for those
systems). It's basically an automated documentation tool with extras that
enable a new person to jump in and be able to navigate the company's network
to find computers and get to work without having to ask where everything is.
But that also helps for the people who have been there for years to not have
to go through and document things. Honestly the ability for it to trace
through the network connections is probably the most game changing powerful
feature. And you can even use it to execute backup scripts on network
switches.

It's enterprise and comes with that price tag, but the cost of it is covered
by the labor hours it saves.

------
thehappypm
I love using Tableau. It has completely changed the way I analyze data --
things that would have taken me a minute or two in Excel takes literally
seconds in Tableau.

~~~
supernova87a
What's Tableau's special secret to handling data? Is it doing table indexing,
summary, and array manipulation in a smarter way compared to dumb Excel?

~~~
thehappypm
It’s honestly just speed. Want to sum this, broken out by that, filtering out
this other thing? Oh want to make it an area chart instead of a bar chart? Add
a color code? These things are just super fast and easy to do

------
jokab
1) nimbletext. when clients send me excel sheets with tons of data to import i
would generate insert statements in the sheets themselves. this is a painful
experience. Then i found out about nimbletext. its pure joy to use.

2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very
easy.

3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use.

4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone to be uber productive

5) Autohotkey. got a ms 4000 ergonomic keyboard and binding all keys a journey
in itself

I'll stop right here but i have tons of other tools i really enjoy using.

~~~
cylentwolf
What kind of customization do you do to VS 2019 to make it more productive?

~~~
tester34
I'm no the OP, but I suggest to use things like

Extensions:

Roslynator

Codemaid

Productivity Power Tools - pack of extensions

_________

And maybe disable option: Reopen documents on solution load

It's in tools -> options -> projects and solutions -> general

------
SMAAART
[https://datastudio.google.com/](https://datastudio.google.com/)

When you've maxed out on what you can do with spreadsheets.

~~~
avipars
Didn't know this thing existed. Thank you ;)

------
bonfire
For me, I have to say it, it's MS Outlook. I do e-mail all day every day and I
use VBA macros and all sorts of shortcuts to make it very useful. Love it.

~~~
culopatin
That is the first time I hear someone praise Outlook. For an application that
gets billions in billing, there are no valid excuses for it to be the same
thing as it was 15 years ago.

~~~
maxerickson
I think there's a solid argument that getting billions in billing while being
stagnant is self evidently a valid excuse to be stagnant.

~~~
bonfire
> I think there's a solid argument that getting billions in billing while
> being stagnant is self evidently a valid excuse to be stagnant.

yes.

------
vmurthy
I've been enamored by Pipedream
([https://pipedream.com](https://pipedream.com)) because as a Product Manager
with engineering background, I can quickly hack together prototypes and get
good feedback from customers :) . Pretty sure there are other nocode software
but this is great for me.

~~~
wackget
What kind of stuff do you use it for? I watched the intro video and I get it
would be useful for "monitoring" Twitter and stuff like that, but are there
more practical day-to-day uses for it?

~~~
vmurthy
My team’s bread and butter is integrations between enterprise systems. So I
can quickly make prototypes of system A and our own software working when a
webhook is triggered on A. Quick feedback plus tweaks before we do formal dev
keeps us from having nasty surprises at the end of integration

------
leokennis
Two:

\- UltraEdit. What Photoshop is to images, UltraEdit is to text. The weird
thing is, it’s not a super flashy or even immediately intuitive tool. But once
you get the hang of it, it never fails to deliver.

\- Excel. It’s insane the breadth of stuff you can do with it. And as a tool,
it’s equally handy and “oh my God this will save me so much work” for a school
teacher as it is for a data analyst and stock broker. It sort of scales
infinitely, there is always one more level of complexity/usefulness to unlock.

~~~
enchiridion
Can you give an example of why UltraEdit is better than emacs? Thanks!

~~~
eli
I assume Emacs can be made to do anything under the sun, but UltraEdit comes
out of the box with a friendly GUI that exposes some fairly complicated text
manipulation tools. On some level it's just personal preference and
familiarity.

------
darkr
* Looker (most usable BI tool I’ve come across so far)

* DataDog (distributed tracing is a dream)

* IntelliJ (idea, goland, pycharm, clion, datagrip)

* MindNode (macOS-only mind-mapping software)

Recently started using smart sheets, but on the fence about this one so far.

~~~
jbhatab
What other BI platforms have you used? We're looking to build out our BI
infrastructure as a service for our customers and are currently testing google
data studio but have looked into Sisense + Looker.

~~~
darkr
QuickSight, Tableau, Chartio. Disappointed with all of these

~~~
huy
You should check out Holistics.io if you're disappointed with all 3 options. A
balance between drag-and-drop for business users and SQL for data analysts,
this is done through a SQL-based data modeling layer.

Disclaimer: I work at Holistics.

------
johnwalkr
GrabCAD. It's free, simple cloud-based version control for CAD files. I don't
think they actually offer an enterprise (on-prem) version anymore but I would
still consider it enterprise software.

The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited
filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval
workflows.

Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the
product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was
meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public
repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service
sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and
an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.

Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:

For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other
engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN
or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle
ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards
(which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if
you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or
dvd).

Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices,
such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with
version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach
a state of no control / word documents.

Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and
more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing
files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to
be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be
somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source
alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s
features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion
360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source
world.

~~~
traeblain
I cannot agree more with this comment. CAD software is still so dominated by
proprietary systems that maintain their own version control and feature set.
And since all the major players offer a "suite" of tools, there's no incentive
to seamlessly interact between products. You spend so much time trying to
figure out how you are going work with importing a neutral export (meaning
you've dissected the data from its version control), and maintaining any data
accuracy.

I was honestly extremely hopeful when OnShape hit the market. Granted it was
still a proprietary tool, but felt it had the tooling and integrations to
bring CAD systems into the "modern era". Then they crippled their free
offering, removing it's discrimination from tools like Fusion. And now with
their purchase by PTC, I have no hope in it making any further waves in the
CAD space.

~~~
johnwalkr
It's obvious to anyone with exposure to software that the whole industry is 25
years behind in version control. It exists in large companies, but as a JIRA
or SAP like system, usually with engineers fighting for the right to work with
local files. It does not exist as standard industry practice that everyone
follows.

I'm sure many people on HN have experience meeting a one-person self-taught
software team in a small company that developed their own version control
system called "copying folders". In mechanical CAD, half of the industry is at
that level, but it's even worse because your shard libraries may be updated
irreversibly and without notification when you don't intend, or not updated
when you intend, depending on such factors as the order in which you loaded
your projects.

I was sad enough that GrabCAD was purchased by Stratasys, but at least it's
plausible that it exists for a while. I didn't know OnShape was purchased by
PTC. I was also really hopeful and play around with it about once a year. It's
always missing something I need, but was getting close, and some of the
features they add are really innovative. They are also honest about what
features are missing.

On the other hand, I still have a soft spot for Pro-E since it was my first
MCAD package and to this day miss some of its parametric features (but
certainly not its interface).

~~~
yasinaydin
GrabCAD engineer here. AFAIK community part of GrabCAD, main website where the
libraries, models, tutorials etc located, is planned to be always free.

As for the features and suggestions, could you please writ them to
[https://grabcad.com/groups/grabcad-community-user-
group](https://grabcad.com/groups/grabcad-community-user-group) where all the
PMs and related engineers follow and improve the product.

------
davedx
JIRA. It's powerful, customizable, flexible and drives workflows and
productivity across millions of companies around the world. It's the SAP of
issue tracking. Despite all the baggage, they still try continuously to
improve the UX of the software so it stays relevant and relatively usable.

There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require
dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger orgs), but come on let's be
honest, it's a huge success story and lets orgs do things "their way" with
project management and software development.

~~~
coblers
It's crazy how different opinions are on JIRA. I think it's the worst tool I'm
forced to use - and have been - at all my dev jobs. It's slow, sluggish, the
UX is horrible and it gets in my way. A lot of dev teams that are outside of
product/project management claws simply opt for using whatever simple kanban
board there might be(Trello, for example).

~~~
manicdee
Every problem you mentioned with a Jira is some decision your IT folks made.
The same every time I hear people telling me how awful the software is: they
complain of autocratic workflows, forms being slow, forms being complex and
having so many mandatory fields that they can’t get anything done.

It’s all due to local configuration, some IT kiddo sees all these bells and
whistles and levers to pull, so they turn them all on thinking more features
is better.

In the meantime the most efficient workflow I have has six states (planning,
execution, UAT, deployment, warranty, closed) and it works just fine and stays
out of my way.

~~~
coblers
JIRA being slow and sluggish doesn't really have anything to do with
configuration. It's a horrible tool to navigate UX-wise.

~~~
richardwhiuk
It's often deployed on completely underpowered servers.

------
waiseristy
Trace32 & the Lauterbach JTAG. Expensive, but intuitive, scriptable, and
performant.

~~~
paxys
Funny but I had the exact opposite experience with it back when I worked in
the space like 10 years ago. The software was clunky and borderline unusable,
every bit of the system was proprietary (I remember we had to pay $10K a pop
for connector cables, which each came with their own limited license), support
was clueless, and there was no ecosystem to speak of (again due to their tight
controls).

~~~
waiseristy
The expense I think is just a side effect of working in this space. Mayne when
things open up prices will go down. As for the softwares usability, I don't
know how much it's changed in the 10 years since you saw it last, but I really
like it. Everything is clickable, the work flow for flashing, symbol loading,
fiddling with registers + peripherals, is better than really any other system
I've used in the space.

------
lmm
I think Slack is the only enterprise software that I use every day and don't
hate.

~~~
dynamite-ready
Definitely. It's much friendlier than Teams. Even little things like your own
personal channel are so thoughtful, I use it outside of work as a cross
platform clipboard (files and links).

I also am much more likely to prioritize Slack messages over email. It is just
Skype with bells on, but it's still very good in it's own right.

------
adjkant
Any Jetbrains IDE - take my money

Okta - Just works, good UI

Workday - I seem to be in the minority but the clean UI + generally decent
tooling allows for a decent deal to be in there

------
sokoloff
Excel, Box, and Zoom. Would vote for Cloudability as well, but that's not
something that I use anywhere near every day.

~~~
maps7
Excel is a pain. It's annoying to open - if I already have Excel open and try
open another Excel document I often have to click into a cell in the currently
opened Excel document for the new document to open.

It's also a pain closing as it prompts do I want to save. Saving as a CSV is a
pain, it takes two prompts to save as a CSV.

File recovery is also a pain.

~~~
nabeards
I converted to Apple Numbers about a year after it came out, and both Excel
and Google Sheets seem completely archaic to me now. I've sent PDFs of my
Numbers docs to people and they are blown away. Now that I can share Numbers
through iCloud to both Mac and Windows users, I've got some people fully
converted over.

~~~
johnwalkr
Multiple tables on one sheet that can be resized is a killer feature. It's
just so easy to make nice looking data and output on one screen compared to
Excel.

------
ex3ndr
Weird but i like Outlook Web, very good replacement for GMail with it's
endless "ui improvements".

~~~
jasonv
I don't hate Outlook at all, and the mobile app is 1000% better than the Gmail
app.

~~~
ex3ndr
iOS app is veeeery good! That's how i eventually moved to paid cloud outlook
since it is also so good.

------
christkv
Clubhouse for managing the software development. It’s really snappy which I
love. Sentry.io for handling all exceptions from applications and mobile
devices in one place.

------
tails4e
Confluence. It's so easy to organise information and documentation now for
technical projects. Of course its free form so people can be messy with it,
but done right, and with the good plugins, like draw.io it's really powerful.
Integrates very well with JIRA also.

~~~
time0ut
I used to think this as well. But over time, I've seen it devolve into a
wasteland of out of date information. This is driven by two factors. First,
the search functionality is by far the worst search I have ever seen. This
leads to duplicate information as people relearn and redocument things because
they couldn't find them. Second, confluence has a very powerful permission
system. Once you get past a certain scale, you can end up with little fiefdoms
of information. Want to update a common piece of documentation? You need to
convince the owner to give you edit rights. Who is the owner? I dunno, start
asking around.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Seconded. The search is bad, and Confluence feels unstructured, but with tight
security.

It was better than DokuWiki, for sure, but DokuWiki was free...

------
dharmab
PagerDuty is generally pretty good, but I haven't used VictorOps or OpsGenie
so I can't compare.

~~~
bradknowles
In my experience, OpsGenie is a huge improvement over PagerDuty.

I’ve helped manage both PagerDuty and OpsGenie at a certain employer, and
while PagerDuty seemed to mostly kinda semi sorta work, there was a lot of
klunky aspects to the system. When we switched to OpsGenie, it was like all
the things we liked about PagerDuty were still present, but we didn’t have any
of the pain points. Moreover, there were additional features that made it even
nicer.

Imagine how good it feels when you stop banging your head against the wall,
and then realize you’ve been banging your head against a wall for the past few
years.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the PagerDuty guys and everything they’ve done as
pioneers in this field, but I much prefer OpsGenie.

In fact, OpsGenie is such low-touch that we now have many fewer people who are
involved in the day to day management of it, each team can manage the things
they really care about, and the rest of us can just get on with our other
work.

~~~
kqr
What sort of thing made you run into trouble with PagerDuty? I've only used it
in smaller teams and we've basically not touched it after setting it up, save
for editing rotations.

Importantly, PagerDuty has (as far as I know) a well deserved reputation for
reliability, which is critical in that space. How is the reliability of these
other providers? How have you measured it?

------
pabe
Odoo ERP. Select the apps (Sales, CRM, Newsletter etc.) you need and profit
from great integrations. Gets rid of all those data back and forth between
independent applications. You can also create your own apps.

~~~
jesterson
Looking at it right now and it does seem to be a wonderful ecosystem with
reasonable pricing. Do you happen to know use cases examples that you can
share?

~~~
throwaway744678
Another happy odoo user here: we use it internally for CRM, sales, purchases,
accounting, product inventory. We also developped modules to make it the back
end of our web/mobile shop, and of our mobile apps.

The flexibility is really great, and while I have not used other ERPs, I
believe it is easier to develop for, and to use as an end-user. Part of the
code is open-source, and you have access to the source of the non-free apps.
As a bonus, it's Python!

Regarding the pricing, it sure is less expensive than the competitors, but the
cost increases fast when you add new modules, or if you have many internal
users (pricing is 100-250€ per module per year + ~250€ per internal user per
year)

EDIT: a live demo with most modules installed is running at
[https://master.odoo.com/saas_master/demo](https://master.odoo.com/saas_master/demo)

~~~
jesterson
Thank you for the feedback. You probably won't be willing to share the
site/app, but if you do, would you mind if I get a look?

------
2000bmw328ci
Autodesk Revit 2020. Although it does have it's quirks, it is a very powerful
modeling program.

------
seesawtron
Matlab: Great for prototyping and tinkering.

~~~
shaklee3
There's a reason Matlab is still around and doing well. It's so much faster to
prototype things in, and systems engineers all know it well. Yes, python can
do most of the same things, but it's nowhere near as easy and integrated.

~~~
olodus
I thought it was only because it had gotten into universities curriculums.

Mostly joking. I agree that Matlab is quite good to quickly setting up certain
things and can even be quite elegant when used by someone who knows it.

I do however feel like it should not get as central of a place in education as
it got at my university. I would prefer more open alternatives to be used to
maybe inspire more simpler exploration by the students.

------
riskneutral
Lotus Notes. You can build your whole application in it, isn't that just
great?

------
winrid
Absolutely loved SumoLogic for the six years or so we used it. Threw terabytes
of logs at them a month and searches were always fast. Being able to do joins
on logs was a godsend. I tried to work there but it seemed like they stopped
hiring for a while.

Now I use Loggly... It's okay.

IDEA's IDEs as others have mentioned.

I've built enterprise software I enjoyed using (reputation.com), does that
count? :)

~~~
klohto
I wasn't aware of SumoLogic but at $2.5/GB ingested, they seem expensive. I
understand that at TB a month of logs Elasticsearch stops being viable, but
what made SumoLogic so great except the speed to warrant the cost?

~~~
winrid
We spent a lot of money on Sumo indeed. But when it helps you keep churn down
it can pay off.

You can also parse the logs and create alerts and dashboards from the parsed
values.

We only retained the logs for 30 days, so you could use Elastic/Kibana and we
did for our dev/qa environments. However people hated it compared to Sumo.

------
time0ut
Splunk is an incredible tool. It is powerful, fast, and just a joy to use. The
skill floor is low and the ceiling is high. Only minor complaint is the APIs
have essentially no documentation if you want to interact with it
programmatically (yes, there is some documentation, but it only covered like
10-20% of the interface last time I looked).

Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is
better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything
that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for
my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they
are definitely force multipliers.

I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so
much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode,
but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better
supported in VSCode.

------
abjKT26nO8
Jira. My only pet-peeves are:

* it breaks native keyboard shortcuts. After disabling the shortcut overrides in settings, "/" is a NOP (which is weird, since disabling the overrides worked in Confluence)

* the markup is non-standard (but I can live with it)

* sometimes it will log me out when I want to post a comment and all of what I wrote in the comment box gets lost

------
mprovost
Superhuman. It's the only software I use at work that I pay for myself because
it makes dealing with email so much less painful. To the point that it's
actually almost enjoyable clearing out my inbox. The ability to do absolutely
everything from the keyboard and being so responsive really makes a huge
difference.

------
tails4e
Vivado. It's for FPGA design, and I while do ASIC design, but I use vivado to
visualise my RTL structure. I find it better than any of the major EDA vendors
RTL schematic viewers (except perhaps starvision). I know people rag on Vivado
for other reasons, but it's visualisation is fantastic!

~~~
tsss
I had to use Vivado once and it was the most miserable experience I ever had
with a development environment. Even Haskell has better IDE support. Vivado is
super unintuitive, it's slow as fuck, it has none of the basic editing
features modern IDEs sport and it has very heavy handed enterprise DRM like
you would normally find on CAD tools.

~~~
tails4e
I hear this a lot, but I really don't get it. The ide is very responsive, when
you are interacting with a design, exploring structure or connectivity, static
timing analysis, etc.. Perhaps you are referring to synthesising RTL - yes
thst is slow, but thats much slower with ASIC tools. Synthesis and PnR is a
very cpu intensive task, and is separate from the GUI really. I'd be
interested in hearing the specifics of what you found slow.

~~~
user5994461
I have to join the other commenters. Vivado is maybe the worst IDE I have
used.

We had new projects and interns stuck for weeks because they couldn't figure
out how to make a hello world project in Vivado (blink a led for a FPGA dev
kit). There was zero doc and zero help available online because it's too
niche. This was only unstuck after a while when one senior guy showed how to
use it and wrote an internal 50 pages docs on how to create a project and do
anything at all. Every single step is an impossible to figure out wonder.

After the initial hiccups, the IDE and the SoC SDK were abysmal. Couldn't
store the software in source control because Vivado had no source control
support and it was autogenerating/overwriting garbage files all over the
place.

To be fair the tool was functional for routing and HDL development. It's
usable professionally if you have time to learn and get trained. This may even
be good by some embedded development standards (embedded consistently has
really shitty development tools that other developers would never tolerate).

~~~
tails4e
Theres loads of docs and step by step tutorials [0] is just one such free set
of material with all files, with step by step PDFs and presentations to
explain basic digital design concepts. This is just one form this larger list
of courses [1], all free. There are also loads of videos showing how the GUI
works [2]

[0] [https://github.com/xupgit/FPGA-Design-Flow-using-
Vivado/tree...](https://github.com/xupgit/FPGA-Design-Flow-using-
Vivado/tree/master/slides)

[1]
[https://www.xilinx.com/support/university.html](https://www.xilinx.com/support/university.html)

[2] [https://www.xilinx.com/video/hardware/getting-started-
with-t...](https://www.xilinx.com/video/hardware/getting-started-with-the-
vivado-ide.html)

Hello World blink an LED can be done in 10 mins flat, I'm afraid you did your
intern a disservice by not giving him or her a basic intro and pointer to the
docs. Do a goole search for vivado design flow and you'll see all those links
I just posted. I lecture in digital design at my local university part time,
and I use Vivado and in one lab students are already able to blink the LED,
and much more.

I do agree the SDK side is a bit dodgy. My biggest bugbear there is project
corruption partly due to being eclipse based. I understand thats been upgraded
to Vitis now, but have not used that yet. Vivado is separate from that and is
very sold though

~~~
user5994461
I was working on that around 2015 if I remember well. Some time after Xilinx
was unifying their development tools into Vivado. The project attempted to use
Zynq SoC, joint software and hardware development on the FPGA in HDL and on
the embedded CPU in C. Not exactly trivial things to do but the scope was very
small for a first go.

We found zero documentation whatsoever on the internet. None of the things you
linked to existed. Looks like it took 5 years for some tutorials to be
written, and it's not even from Xilinx, it's from some guy sharing on GitHub
(maybe a university).

Interns were not to blame, more experienced engineers couldn't figure a thing
and there was a 3 months deadline. If it were not for one employee who tried
the Zynq platform 6 months before and was trained by Xilinx, the whole thing
would surely have been canned.

There was lots of issues with the platform and the IDE once got a hello world
working (I really hope Xilinx fixed most of them). Basic APIs were not working
or were documented wrong, the compiler had issues (modified gcc under a
modified eclipse), the IDE occasionally crashed or got stuck (it called a ton
of sub processes that got lost or failed).

The SoC IO pins were undocumented (needed info and identifier to do the
routing), had to get private doc from Xilinx and they had typo in their pin
layouts, so there was a constant risk to misconfigure a pin and fry the board
(FPGA don't forgive mixing up input and output and voltage).

Now that I remember about it. The whole thing was pretty insane. ^^

My only question if I had to work on this again would be, does vivado support
Git/SVN nowadays?

~~~
tails4e
Thanks for the detailed reply, but FYI the github stuff is from xilinx, they
just make it open source.

In 2015 vivado was pretty new, it's come a long way, so I'd give it another
look. There has been a strong push as you can see to make the developer
experience much better, so hopefully if you give it another chance you may
come to appreciate it as much as I do.

~~~
user5994461
To be fair, the HDL tools are decent. There are some quirks but they get the
job done (obviously it's professional tooling, not something an enthusiast can
pick up over a weekend). I think you're working on the FPGA side?

However the software development experience is dismal overall. I doubt it will
ever improve much, hardware companies just don't make good development tools.

The closest experience developers get to embedded might be android
development. The IDE are good, source control, auto completion, the platform
documentation is amazing, fully documented API with examples, there are entire
guides on how the system work, remote debugging on the device (I've developed
on Android version 1 a decade ago and it was all there). It's just great. Now
try developing for a MCU and half the manufacturers can't document how to read
an IO pin or use the DAC. I'm not looking forward to moving back to embedded.
^^

------
jimbob45
\- TortoiseSVN/TortoiseGit make everything a snap when it comes to repository
work. I can’t recommend these enough.

\- Agent Ransack is a GUI for findstr. Much nicer to use than the one in
Notepad++.

\- VS 2019 is incredible. I weep for the parallel universe where we’re all
stuck using Eclipse for everything.

~~~
anjanb
IntelliJ tools are quite good. Most IntelliJ tools are better than most
Eclipse equivalents.

------
cferr
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I'll throw in Nagios. Having had to roll
and maintain an in-house solution with similar functionality before, Nagios is
a huge breath of fresh air.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is also awesome. I wish we could have 8, but that's
not quite in the pipeline yet. The distro is crazy stable. With the Extras,
Optionals, EPEL, etc. repositories enabled you get access to almost all of the
best software in the Linux ecosystem.

Ansible, particularly Red Hat Ansible Engine, is also amazing for managing all
of my Red Hat servers. I couldn't imagine doing half of my job by hand, as
nothing would ever really get done. With Ansible you just fire off a playbook
and relax.

------
finnthehuman
Microsoft Outlook. Seriously.

I can list gripes for days, and I wish thunderbird would integrate with all
the features of exchange better, but I don't know how anyone gets by work with
webmail. I feel such a lack of control in my personal gmail box.

------
client4
I'm not sure it counts as enterprise software, but Fiberstore is one of the
best websites I've ever interacted with. It's clearly laid out, gives
recommendations, and is quick and simple. I make weekly purchases and it's
always easy.

------
jll29
Would be helpful to clarify what you mean by enterprise software (certainly
the answers name software that I don't consider fitting that category).

Do you mean Enterprise Resources Planning systems like SAP R/3 v. Oracle
Applications?

------
ForrestN
Basecamp. Incredibly thoughtful design, radically reduces stress and
confusion.

------
LVB
Google CloudSearch against our GSuite data. It’s impressive how much better it
is at searching our Drive and Docs content compared to those tools’ own
search. Burrowing into Gmail for results is also handy.

------
spapas82
Although I don't use it anymore since I've changed jobs, for me it would be
Appian. For people not familiar with it checkout my description in this
comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583081)

Beyond it's shortcomings it's something I'd gladly pay for (if I needed it of
course) because it can't really be replaced by something free / opensource.

------
t312227
imho.

dynatrace - expensive as hell, but really really useful for large
organisations if you are operating your own software and depend on its
functionality - read: financial biz etc.

------
no-dr-onboard
\- Burp Suite Pro: MitmProxy, Postman, ZAP just don't compare. The extensions
API and library are top notch and the community is really thriving atm. The
only downside that I can think of is that occasionally a release will suffer
from what seems like a memory leak. Projects can consume upwards of 15G ram
and 100% allcore CPU spikes are not uncommon. Something, something, Java.

~~~
fh4ntke
Yes, it's really worth the money. Otherwise, I only use open source tools

------
tardismechanic
Algolia - search as a service

------
juancn
I love Wavefront for metrics and Sumologic for log queries. They make
troubleshooting and monitoring thousands of servers a pleasure.

Both have excellent UIs and they are truly powerful.

Avoid any Graffana based solutions, the only good thing I can say about them
is that they are free.

------
forty
A few great security-related products we use:

\- Hashicorp Vault (secret management)

\- Duo Security (2FA)

\- StrongDM (Database authentication and auditing)

------
fxtentacle
IntelliJ, PyCharm, and the git to docker deployment service that I built
myself for my companies.

------
meztez
RStudio, server and connect are such a treat to interact with compared to
anaconda entreprise.

------
znpy
I have fond memories of SecureCRT as an ssh terminal on windows and Mac. It
works on Linux too however.

It was just better than the regular ssh client.

Really worth it's price, if anything because you can create a set of sessions
and share them with all your colleagues.

------
teekert
Linux. Man I love Linux, but I don't just use it in my enterprise environment.
Linux also powers my smartphone, my home server, my HTPC and apparently also
my EdgeRouter X so probably even more of my life I don't even know about.

------
krakatau1
There are two tools nobody mentioned yet.

DbVisualizer -> best GUI for databases, you learn it well and use for all
databases

Editpad -> fastest text editor I’ve ever seen with bunch of useful features
and terrific regex (see regexbuddy from the same author)

------
chid
Outlook? I'd say Excel but these days I don't use it every day.

------
toomuchtodo
Excel

------
INTPenis
I had to dig deep for this since I'm a FOSS specialist and advocate. But if
you're going to count softwares that I depend on then Active Directory and
vCenter come to mind.

------
s4ik4t
These days we are mostly collaborating on Microsoft Teams.

~~~
atraac
Do you consider it the best enterprise software though?

I find Teams to be incredibly bad. It's slow, it literally has a typing lag to
the point where you type something, press enter to send and then start another
message, letters get eaten and sent with previous message. It eats more ram
than JetBrains IDE at this point. It has a very bad UX, a lot of (slow) tab
switching, pictures do not even load for me most of the time(unless
restarted), sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds to mark something as read on
the 'Activity' tab which is even more annoying. Insanely bad custom
notification system instead of using built in Windows notifications. Add to
that terrible API, weird flow of adding apps to conversations and few more
things. It grew to become my most hated application that I have to use every
day.

------
fh4ntke
Burp Suite [https://portswigger.net/burp](https://portswigger.net/burp)

------
rurban
Only GitHub

~~~
justinzollars
try Phabricator

------
pavlov
Workplace by Facebook. Not kidding, I like it.

~~~
ashrodan
It's god awful UI is laggy Chat has no threading Integrations are limited

------
RabbitmqGuy
[https://about.sourcegraph.com/](https://about.sourcegraph.com/)

------
dave_sid
Not Jira. Hahahahaha.

~~~
mrslave
Is anyone just using Git{Hub,Lab,Tea} issues and being fine with it?

Is the absence of a Kanban board a deal breaker? Perhaps for management.

~~~
closeparen
Git-adjacent issue trackers are communication tools for developers. JIRA is a
surveillance and control mechanism for senior executives. It just depends on
the size of your company.

~~~
brazzy
> Git-adjacent issue trackers are communication tools for developers.

So is JIRA.

> JIRA is a surveillance and control mechanism for senior executives.

Never saw it being used like that, though I see how it could be abused.

> It just depends on the size of your company.

The culture probably more than the size.

------
DrNuke
MS Office, of course (no pun intended).

------
badrabbit
Splunk! If only it didn't cost an arm and a leg. No other solution, open or
closed comes close.

Second best: Office 365

~~~
jakozaur
Have you looked at Sumo Logic?

~~~
badrabbit
Thank you! First time hearing of it. I just looked it up, it looks similar to
Azure sentinel? Is it really cheaper than on-prem splunk?

Good query language (rollup,piping,stats,etc...),visualization and rich
function set (eval and stats functions in splunk) is a minimum requirement for
me. Tried Kibana,Graylog,Sentinel and a few others I can't mention here.

~~~
slyall
Sumo is cheaper the Splunk from all accounts but still pretty expensive. Think
half the price of Splunk perhaps. It's still nice but we ended up spending a
lot of time trying to keep out bill down by not sending data to it since the
price is based on the number of GB/day you send it.

~~~
badrabbit
That pricing model is a big turn off. Really looking for something that lets
you process events to use a smart approach to pick and choose what to ingest
before you get billed for it.

------
SAI_Peregrinus
JetBrains CLion. It's by far the best C/C++/Rust IDE I've found. Much nicer
than Visual Studio (refactorings especially), very capable out of the box,
good plugin ecosystem, surprisingly fast (obviously slower to start than
vim/sublime/etc but plenty fast once running), and way nicer than the
afterthoughts most chip vendors provide.

------
aojdwhsd
ITRS Geneos for environment monitoring. I just wish they built *BSD binaries.

------
mister_hn
Visual Studio Professional, ActiveDirectory, PrimeKey EJBCA and OpenLimit CC
Sign.

They work really well

------
closeparen
Phabricator

~~~
mrweasel
Enterprise indeed, I had to use it when working with a client, it’s was ...
different.

No intergration with something like Jira, no support for pull-requests/merge-
request, navigation is pretty terrible.

~~~
closeparen
What? Tasks (unit of work) and Diffs (unit of code review) are its two central
entities. Which parts of it were you using, if not those?

~~~
mrweasel
Sounds like that may not be Phabricators fault in that case. I was under the
impression that you'd need Arcanist if you wanted to do reviews of diffs.

The problem may have been that we where only allowed to use the Git part.

~~~
closeparen
Ah. Arc is just a script for submitting the patch from your working copy to
Diffusion (like emailing to LKML). Technically you could paste “git diff” into
the web UI.

------
exabrial
gitlab, metabase, graylog, TICK (telegraf, influxdb, chronograf, kapacitor)

~~~
beckingz
Metabase is great.

------
hagonzalez94
Gramerlie

~~~
SMAAART
It took me a second... #LOL

------
tobiasbischoff
Everything pivotal

------
aus_sua
BigQuery, Snowflake and Splunk for data analysis.

------
venki80
We use Dremio for queries on S3. Years ahead of Athena.

------
enz
Fastmail and Trello.

------
harrylepotter
Roadmunk - fantastic, simple roadmapping tool

------
arjunbanker
asana, looker, google sheets, vscode

------
seancoleman
Sisense (formerly Periscope)

------
austincheney
Node.js

~~~
justinzollars
troll

------
pachico
Probably gitlab on premise

------
sys_64738
Windows 10

------
paxys
TL;DR developers like developer tools.

------
fnord123
hubspot, zendesk.

------
hagonzalez94
gramerlie

------
irrational
Jetbrains IntelliJ. I use it for html, JS, CSS, Vue, node.js, Python, Java,
SQL, etc. I’ve tried visual studio and some other IDEs, but find intellij to
be superior in every way.

~~~
dcminter
You know, I just don't get the love for IntelliJ. I used to use Eclipse (or
more often than not Spring Tool Suite) and I rather liked that. More and more
I'm obliged to use IntelliJ and in comparison it just seems ... okay.

Its suggestions stuff is nice, and it works reasonably well. In particular it
supports multiple languages much better than Eclipse's motley range of
plugins. So I can see why your list of uses makes it the superior option
there.

But for primarily Java development, which is where I encounter it and the most
vocal love for it, it lacks a couple of key features (or non-obvious
configuration to enable them I guess?)

* You can't run code unless the whole project compiles (poor for quick sanity check, test driven development, and refactoring breaking changes).

* You don't get the "problems" view of compilation issues (and optionally analysis output like findbugs) so as often as not I'll try to run a test, building the whole shebang, when the end result will be needing to fix a trivial syntax error. Eclipse tells me that _first_.

* It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the same explorer view.

It also, anecdotally, feels slower than Eclipse, and seems to enjoy popping up
focus-stealing windows more often than Eclipse (though I guess I can cuss
Gnome just as much for that one).

I don't hate it, but I do miss Eclipse.

Edit: I should add that it supports Gradle rather better than Eclipse does,
but since I _really_ dislike Gradle I'm not sure how much of a plus that is!

~~~
davet91
> It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects
> simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets
> you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the
> same explorer view.

That's a common confusion about IntelliJ.

Eclipse Workspace -> IntelliJ Project

Eclipse Project -> IntelliJ Module

In IntelliJ create an empty Project and import all your Maven or Gradle
projects as Modules. Everything in one window :)

~~~
dcminter
I will try this and report back :) thanks for the clarification!

Edit: Ok, report.

It's... close enough. I don't really like the need to create a new project to
contain the "IntelliJ droppings" :) but honestly that's not that different
from Eclipse's workspace directories.

Thanks for the tip!

------
siddharthgoel88
Beyond Compare.

I find this tool very very useful when you have lots of integration job. If
you have an enterprise version, then you can do stuff like compare and merge
files across two servers, compare PDFs, ZIPs, JAR, and obviously plain text
files. This is a tool for which I definitely ask for an Enterprise Version
license whenever I join a new organization.

~~~
shoo
beyond compare gets bonus points for having special features for diffing and
merging tabular data. for example, if you're comparing a couple of CSV files,
you can mark some columns as unimportant to help focus on diffing and merging
differences in the remaining columns you deem are important. this can be quite
helpful if manually regression testing tabular output from some report
generating tool, where most of the output is deterministic but the tool
pollutes one column with timestamps or ids that differ every run.

the ability to compare and merge directories is also nice (although a number
of open source diff and merge tools also support this -- e.g. kdiff3, meld)

------
diehunde
I don't know if it counts as enterprise software but I use Jetbrains' products
everyday. Goland, IntelliJ and PyCharm are great tools.

~~~
CraftThatBlock
Why use 3 different ones when IntelliJ can do all of the features of the
listed editors? PyCharm is IntelliJ locked with Python plugin, etc.

~~~
diehunde
I've heard that before but I'm skeptic about if it's exactly the same.

~~~
CraftThatBlock
The only one that is different is Rider, since it has much deeper C#
integration (might be others such as DataGrip, but never used it). PyCharm and
GoLand are just plugins (same as WebStorm, PhpStorm, etc)

~~~
grogenaut
technically resharper is way diferent as well but whether you'd call it a ide
is "questionable"

~~~
jolux
Rider runs ReSharper underneath

------
axaxs
Does VSCode count? That's the first IDE to make me switch from Vim. I was
reluctant at first, but now I feel lost without it.

For saas, probably Workday. I really enjoy it compared to what we had used
prior.

~~~
shawabawa3
Does a free open source code editor count as enterprise software?

...no

Just because Microsoft wrote it doesn't make it enterprise

~~~
mellosouls
If it's used across the enterprise, it's arguably enterprise.

------
amlidajames
I mostly use Sage Business Cloud X3 software which is one of the best
enterprise software.

------
rp00
Salesforce

------
jupp0r
None, pretty much everything that has enterprise in its name is a nuisance to
me.

