Labstats?

[jhuls]

I just learned that our campus has purchased labstats to monitor usage in our labs and was curious if anyone has or is using it that could weigh in their opinion on it. The people involved in purchasing it, as usual, basically only looked to see if they had a Mac version. I'm curious though as to whether there are any hoops to jump through in using it on the Mac side.

If anyone has anything to share about this product, I'd appreciate seeing what you have to say.

[jefff]

We deploy it to our lab and classroom Macs with Jamf Pro. Client is very small, lightweight and easy to deploy. The LabStats portal has plenty of ways to slice and dice usage statistics.

[jhuls]

@jefff Thanks. So, you didn't have any hoops to jump through to configure it to work?

Are your Macs in an active directory domain? My director made a comment that on the Windows side that a certain aspect of it would work through AD and then said we would have to see how it would work with Macs even though he knows that they're bound to the domain. I tried to get more details as to what he meant but he wouldn't answer that question during our time of discussion.

[jefff]

@jhuls I didn't set up our LabStats portal, so I'm not sure whether anything was done to tie it to Active Directory. The person who set up the dashboard downloaded the client from it and gave it to me to deploy. I tested it on a small batch before deploying it out to the few hundred Macs we wanted to measure. Once we deployed the agent package with Jamf Pro, we didn't have to do anything else before the Macs we wanted to monitor appeared in the portal.

I should mention that our Applications team likes the data from LabStats so much that they're proposing we purchase additional seats and deploy it to the entire Windows and Mac fleets!

[edit} I didn't answer one of your questions about AD. We have a mix of bound and unbound Macs in the fleet, but all of our lab Macs are bound to AD.

[jhuls]

@jefff Thanks. That's all good to know. I'm hoping ours goes as easy as it sounds like it did for you.