Last week, Paglo Labs Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup announced the public beta of its open source software product called Paglo Crawler. The company bills the product as “the search engine for IT”; it is designed to provide inventory management, network management and software audits of IT environments.

Paglo collects data across the IT environment and indexes it; users can search for information by doing key word searches and view the returned information in charts and dashboards. “It’s like Google for IT,” Chris Waters, co-founder and CTO of Paglo said.

While Paglo claims to offer the first search engine for IT, the folks at Splunk – “The IT Search Company,” are sure to differ.

Waters says that Paglo’s business model – its product is available as a software-as-a-service – sets it apart from other infrastructure management tools. To use the software, IT administrators download it from Paglo’s website, set up a crawler on a PC or server, and the software will collect data throughout the environment. The IT data is stored on servers in Paglo’s data center that that is accessible via a secure web browser.

Another differentiator says Waters, is Paglo’s social networking feature. Through Paglo Share-its, IT administrators can make their searches, dashboards and alerts available to the Paglo community. “This is useful in the case of a security vulnerability,” said Waters where one IT admin can tap into the collective knowledge of a group to find the best way to solve a problem. “It’s social networking applied to enterprise IT,” he said.

Tony Moraros, an IT consultant who works with small-to-midsized businesses has been using Paglo for about five weeks. It’s extremely efficient for us to use it to monitor clients’ environments, do troubleshooting and project planning,” said Moraros, whose company, Tony the Computer Guy, is based in San Mateo, Calif.

Moraros looked at other tools, including Splunk, but concluded that they were more geared to enterprises based on both their cost and functionality. “I only wanted a tool that would allow me to search, was easy to implement and has a low upfront cost,” he said. “Splunk looked like a good tool, but I needed a pickup truck, not an 18-wheeler.”

Moraros says he uses Paglo in a variety of ways; for example, he searches for a particular virus based on a file name. “I can search the whole environment and find out which machines have that virus,” he said. “I don’t have to search every computer with a scan.”

Moraros also uses Paglo to help clients plan technology upgrades. He’ll search on CPU or memory capacity, for example, and tag those machines below certain thresholds. “I can be much more proactive in terms of planning,” he said.

Moraros can also be much more efficient when it comes to monitoring. “I do a lot of things remotely that I don’t have to be on site for,” he said. “I can have a look at ten machines with one search in seconds.”

Paglo is currently in beta and is free to download. According to Waters, pricing is yet to be determined.

Would you acquire an IT asset management system via SaaS? And is social networking with peers something that would be useful to monitor IT assets? Let us know.