Activate Application Usage Data Collection Selectively?

mschroder
Valued Contributor

Dear Experts,

do you know whether it is possible to activate the collection of App usage data only for selected apps? We would like to know the usage patterns for some apps, but we don't want to collect this info for each and every app. So far I have found no way to enable this selectively, are you aware of any way?

Cheers,

Matthias

2 REPLIES 2

marklamont
Contributor III

It's on or it's off, and even when on it's not really much use as far as we could ever work out. draws nice pictures but that's it.

cwaldrip
Valued Contributor

If Jamf can't do it, then find a way to do it yourself. :-)

Before I moved to Jamf I wrote a script that runs each minute to see if certain apps were running and log the results. Basically it just uses ps and grep for the specific process names we're looking for and if it's running adds a "1" to a log file. That info would get tallied into a separate log file that'd tell you the total time the process has been running (it'd roll up months into new files, and years too). So I could tell you exactly how many minutes a machine had been using Premiere Pro for the last year for example. Note that it doesn't tell you if it's active or in the background - just running (now I know there's a way to do that too, but if it ain't broken...). So an edit machine will probably leave the app open all the time (and that's taken into account) while someone in administration probably won't. It's the users in the middle we're interested in. We'd use this to determine if they really needed to have Premiere Pro on the next upgrade for example. Not foolproof, but more reliable results that Jamf seems to be able to gather.