Proactive Reporting in JSS

[Chuey]

Hello All,

Thank you for taking the time to check out my post. Recently I've been trying to be more proactive with computers and having them report more data to us. We've created a bunch of extension attributes to report things like specific software versions, hard drive space, AD Bind status, battery cycle count, and a few others. I was wondering what anyone else may do to help them be more proactive ? Any thoughts / suggestions is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[mm2270]

Hi. I know many of us also have an Uptime Extension Attribute as part of our settings. Its somewhat debatable how useful an uptime value actually is though, since its a static moment in time - when the Mac submits inventory - and may no longer be anywhere near accurate by the time you see it in the JSS. The user may have rebooted for example, by the time their Mac shows up in a report.
Still, it could at least provide some trends, as in, who often has high uptimes being reported, and you can then take some action if needed.

We also have other Extension Attribute items such as:
• Current Airport Network (though completely rewritten from the one in the templates)
• Management account (custom EA script that uses the API)
• Network Time Server
• Date Imaged (we use Deploy Studio and can get that information from the ds log. Not sure if there's an easy way using Casper Imaging)
• USB and Thunderbolt Ethernet MAC addresses
• Installed Preference Panes (captures any 3rd party ones installed + their BundleIdentifiers. Helps us when we need to unlock any in the EnabledPreferencePanes MCX settings)

There are a bunch more, but many are just ones that apply to what we have installed or need to keep track of. Hopefully the above ones will help spark a few more ideas.

[davidacland]

A few other things we often monitor are around the logs, specifically the system.log and secure.log files.

We have extension attributes that look for errors in the logs and reports back to the JSS.

This just reports back a pass or fail in the <result> tags, dropping them into a smart group and sending us an email.

The only downside with this approach is the delay in spotting the problems. With the default inventory collection schedule it may be up to a week before you know there is a problem. If thats in the secure.log file thats not good. To get around this we have a client side script that runs more often (once per hour) and reports back via the Casper API if there is a problem. Still writing into an extension attribute, but just a plain text field instead.

[ImAMacGuy]

SMART status for hard drives has come in handy for us several times preventing data loss...

[Chuey]

Thank you for all of your responses. I appreciate the feedback !

[#6]

I use EAs to check installed versions of Java, Adobe Flash, MS Silverlight, and the Wacom tablet driver, among others. I've also found the Free Disk Space as Percentage to be useful occasionally..

[Chris_Hafner]

We certainly track just about everything everyone else here mentioned... and mostly because they already produced the EA's to do so ;-) Thanks folks!

The one unique item that we track is an averaged pageout count so we can try to see who might be in need of more RAM. This is super subjective and is based around # of pageouts/hour of uptime. We simply use it as an indicator of who's pushing their systems.