JSS API and monitoring dashboards

[adamcodega]

This quarter I'm going to be looking into how I can use the JSS API to put relevant monitoring data about my Macs on my department dashboard. (An HDTV hanging overhead)

Our monitoring has to be relevant and useful, so not just pretty bar graphs of the same data. Maybe I would toss up a module for a week that would tell me how many people had been patched from POODLE, or how many people had used a new app on Self Service so we could judge adoption.

Is anyone else doing anything outside of the JSS homepage to monitor or view dashboard like stats?

[calumhunter]

This sounds super cool, interested to see what you come up with

[adamcodega]

Thanks! In that case I'll come back around and make a blog post to show off what we put together.

I work for a software company so I have the benefit of having developers as co-workers. (We use Geckoboard here)

[calumhunter]

Awesome. We have big screen TV's here in the head office showing not so pretty graphs and stats from some SRS reporting thing for the Windows devices - i've been asked if we can get data from the macs in there as well...

[dpertschi]

@adamcodega this interests me as well. I've got zero experience working with the API, but would love to figure out how I can (or illustrate to someone else) publish real time patch penetration statistics (i.e.: Security Update 2014-005 for 10.8.5 = 91% deployment) to a 'dashboard' for our security department.

Right now I have to do the math manually via smart group reporting = hassle!

[jonvdp]

@adamcodega were you successful in using geckoboard to display stats?

[brandonusher]

Not sure about @adamcodega's progress but for those who want a free option of dashboards you can use http://dashing.io/ which is Open Source and written in Ruby

[tlarkin]

I have done a bit of work with the API and Zabbix, but not much. You can plug the data in from Zabbix into pretty much any dashboard. I set up a processor to poll for devices that are FV2 encrypted and then put it into a simple dash board. It was not too difficult, but I was using some free "not-so-pretty," dash boards and I had the API call running every 30 minutes to update the data. It worked, but it definitely was not ideal or streamlined. I just did it to learn Zabbix mostly and get a very basic proof of concept.

Unfortunately those VMs were on my older system and not fully backed up when I migrated over to my new Mac a while back ago. So, I don't have any of the Zabbix configs to share. Plus even if I did, they are all probably not that great since I was just learning how to use it.

Robot Cloud does a dashboard as well that plugs into the JSS if you are looking to just implement a product rather than build a solution from scratch. I don't have much experience with it, but it does look nice (a lot nicer than all the open source web templates I was using).

Robot Cloud Dashboards

Looking forward to what you all come up with. I am mainly commenting on this thread so I can more easily track its progress. :-)

Cheers,
Tom

[mm2270]

@thoule recently pointed me in the direction of Google Charts (javascript based charting tools), which he has been using to build some graphs. While Google Charts are pretty basic, I've been putting a script together based on his work that is pulling data from the API and generating a webpage with a bunch of charts. Things like FileVault 2 compliance (pie chart), Casper check in and inventory timeframes (side by side column charts), disk size ranges, memory size ranges, OS version spread, Mac models, Active Directory bind status, etc etc. Some of it is coming from custom Extension Attributes we've created, but much of it comes from the built in data collection from the JSS.

Right now its a script that I can run myself or run from Self Service and open the resulting webpage, but I'm looking to get this running on a schedule on one of our Mac servers and hosted from there so anyone in the org can get to it.

[thoule]

An older version of the script is available at my GitHub. Mm2270 made it a billion times faster in the new version which is not posted yet. I do have it running on a web server so I can look at current info at any time. And management loves pie charts.

[#11]

Aldo looking forward to seeing what everyone has running..

Meanwhile, I'm just gonna leave this here:

https://github.com/yaronn/wopr/blob/master/README.md