Probably preaching to the choir, but wanted to hightlight a few points when it comes to asset management. Jamf is a perfectly fine asset management option at the beginning, all your questions can be answered from it, until it’s not. The challenge is historical data. Eventually, the amount of devices you’ve ever purchased exceeds the amount of active devices in Jamf, and it doesn’t make sense to try and maintain things using the Unmanage option.
You want to be able to answer..
- How long did we use this computer from this particular invoice?
- How many devices have we purchased each year, for the past five years?
- How long was each of those devices in use?
- I need the value of all of our on hand devices with their purchase dates and calculated depreciation value.
- An audit wants me to show that we own this device, can you show me a receipt from when we recycled it, because it was damaged?
- How many devices did we recycle last year?
It’s not sustainable to try and answer these questions via searching email and running custom Jamf searches.
Items shouldn’t be deleted from an asset management system. An asset, even if it’s retired/resold will still exists in the system with the appropriate status as a historical record.
I’d also imagine there’s at least some non Jamf devices to track. Network equipment, dashboard TVs, check-in stands an iPad sits in. Rather than a separate spreadsheet you can keep all of that in the same system. I know Asset Panda is a popular Jamf integration option but there’s plenty of good ones out there. I’d start by seeing what your ticket system offers for asset management. You can build an integration between Jamf and them relatively easily with a middle service like Tray.io, Okta Workflows, Make.com etc. Some ITSM platforms even have their own tool for integration disparate services.