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Question

hooking Tableau in to Jamf to produce useful app usage reports

  • March 16, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 36 views
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One of my big frustrations w/ JAMF is the fact that it collects lots of application usage data but provides no good way to WORK with that data. For example, I'm interested in this data for the purposes of sw license auditing ("Do we really need to be buying you the full Adobe CC subscription when we can see that you used Photoshop for about 30 minutes total over the past six months?").

We have Tableau but I have no experience with it; anybody used it (or a tool like it) to hook into JAMF data for the sake of parsing the info the JSS captures? Any tips/instructions/directions you could dpoint me in?

    4 replies

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    • steve_summers
    • Valued Contributor
    • March 16, 2017

    ChrisJScott,
    Hey. FWIW, I was just tasked with created a PList for Tableau Mac users that would enable the reporting of Tableau versions when they log into the Tableau website internally. Here is a link to the Tableau help page, showing what to create. It's really easy: Tableau Reporting

    I think (key word...late in the day...on a caffeine downhill slide..) this will at least, show you what versions people are on and also show you who's using it. (Those that log into the site are using the software.)

    Hope that helps you man. Cheers...

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    • ChrisJScott
    • New Contributor
    • March 30, 2017

    Steve:

    Thanks for the reply but, unfortunately, that's not quite what I'm after - I'm trying find out how to connect Tableau to our JAMF database in order to extract the software usage info that JAMF records so I can analyze it in a useful way (something the JSS lacks, at present).

    The article you linked to describes how to configure Tableau Desktop to communicate w/ the Tableau server....

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    To any who may be looking for this info, I recently received a very useful reply from Molly @ JAMF Support, copied here:

    <snip>
    Have you ever explored using the JAMF API? We can create a read only account that can be used to pull information from the JAMF database. If you go to https://YourJSSURL/api you should be able to see the information you can gather from the database. This sounds like it may be able to help what you are looking to achieve.

    Here are a couple of videos from our JAMF Nation User Conference to reference:

    I can do What with the JSS API?
    https://www.jamf.com/resources/i-can-do-what-with-the-jss-api/

    You've Got API!
    https://www.jamf.com/resources/youve-got-api/

    Why API?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYtzUwiHsYw&index=6&list=PLlxHm_Px-Ie2H5YVmC9rYyJFcknaGe-eP
    </snip>

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    • benducklow
    • Valued Contributor
    • October 27, 2017

    @ChrisJScott-work This is a road I am looking to explore. I know we have Tableau here at our organization in some fashion, I just don't really know where to start.. Have you done much with this since you posted about this? I believe I need to start by requesting access to Tableau internally?? Is this a desktop application that I use to connect to the JSS database via the API? Or do I need access to a Tableau server that in turn is setup to interface with the JSS database via API?

    Dumb, noob questions, but figured I'd throw it out there in case someone else was wondering.

    Thanks in advance.

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