Automated Reporting

me_c
New Contributor

Hi, I am reasonably new to casper and have a complex environment utilising many different technologies which I am trying to bring together from a reporting perspective.
I cannot see how I can automate the export of an invetory list (or anything for that matter) from Casper.
I'm guessing other people must be doing this. Are you using a third party tool to gather reporting data? If so please will you advise.
thanks in advance.
Chris

4 REPLIES 4

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

There's nothing in the product that automates generating reports. There is an existing Feature Request (a very old one in fact) that I suggest you add your vote to. You can find it here.

This is a long LONG overdue feature that Jamf really should find a way to get into the product. I had some hope that it would come with version 10, but alas, we still wait.

Emmert
Valued Contributor

You can use the API to gather some information from the command line or from a website. I haven't done anything with it this year, because it's a pain to configure, but it is possible.

For example, to create this chart I made five smart groups, and had the API find out how many members were in each one. Then I had the page stuff them into a Google Chart. It works, but it's not very friendly for making changes to.

e814a9011ef940c4bfbd95b9fabf3455

It would be possible to create a script that writes to CSV as part of a cron job or something, but as mm2270 says, ultimately right now the burden is on us to create those reports in-house.

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

Yeah, it's possible to do it with the API. I have an old script kicking around on my HD somewhere that will pull saved advanced reports and convert them to a csv format, but it's using an API resource that I suspect may go away sometime as it's been superseded by a different resource which is harder to use for the purpose of pulling said report.

And I've also used Google Charts in the past to do things like posted above. It takes a fair amount of work and testing to get it to work right, and it's prone to breakage since Google can change their API for Google Charts at any moment. So I wouldn't call it a stable way of accomplishing it.

The best thing would be for Jamf to at least allow us to set up a schedule to email reports (simple csv files) to a dist list for any saved reports we deem. It's not everything we could want, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Look
Valued Contributor III

If you have an SQL expert floating around you can also have them pull data directly from the tables as well, we have done this for a few key pieces of data.