Self Service Usage tracking

[BOBW]

Quick question,

Is there any way other than going through each of our 100+ policies to see who is using self service?

I know there is logs on each computer but can't say it would be easy to get to all of them, or find them on our network at the same time or even a 1 week period

So would be nice to have a EA to show the number of Apps downloaded through Self Service, maybe read the number of files inside receipt folder, but then this would also get the files pushed out through policies and not self service.

thanks

[mm2270]

There's another thread from only a week or two back asking basically the same thing. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to pull any metrics on Self Service usage, whether from the JSS or from the clients. I would love for JAMF to add this into the product. Given how much emphasis there is, from JAMF themselves mind you, on using Self Service for a user driven experience, rather than a top down IT pushing stuff on users approach, what better way to help drive the point home than to be able to easily pull usage statistics on Self Service? Sadly, its practically impossible to do this. The best I can offer is to see if you can glean some data from the jamf.log. If, for example, all your Self Service policies are named a certain way, or perhaps all the non SS ones are named a certain way and you can use some reverse grepping, you may be able to pull some data of the specific Self Service installs done from that. It won't be easy and would only even be possible if there is a way to differentiate them by some naming convention, since the log itself doesn't indicate when a policy was run from Self Service versus other methods.

Going forward, you could add something to every Self Service policy that would write some data into a unique SelfService log file, with the date and the policy name, that could then be picked up in an Extension Attribute.

[Summers]

I completely agree that having some user based metrics would be in JAMF's best interest, not to mention ours as admins. At my company, we are constantly being asked to justify why we have 3 management suites. (SCCM, AirWatch and Casper). With no data surrounding who is using Self Service, how many enrollment's were performed in a year (really?) and how much value Casper adds, the yearly review meetings get harder and harder to justify. Honestly, our company may move away from JAMF in 2016 and move to a competitor just so they can say they consolidated management tools for the fleet. JAMF: we need help in defending your product!! (Hello...? Is this thing on??)

[millersc]

+1 with @Summers Justifying the cost of JSS is something most of us have to do yearly when JAMF sends the bill.

[AVmcclint · Accepted solution]

Something like this feature request? https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/featureRequest.html?id=819

[mm2270]

Agreed 100% with @Summers. Well said man. We also get the yearly "grilling" on if we should continue to pay for Casper. So far we've been able to stave off any suggestions that we move to another product, or consolidate, but it gets harder every year. Now that the company I work at has essentially acquired a competing management solution, the question has been raised again - "why aren't we using our own product for this?" If we could just get some of these important feature requests filled, it would go a long way toward proving the products value, but we are left holding the bag and making our own justifications, or building custom solutions for something that really needs to be a simple built in process. While we, Casper admins, fully understand the product's value, managers need numbers, charts and metrics, and Casper Suite is sadly behind the times in this regard. We looked at the competing product mentioned above, and although their actual management processes are weaker than Casper's. they are way ahead of JAMF in terms of providing reports and data.

[cwaldrip]

It's a three year feature request, and a very important one I feel. Sadly I can't up-vote it more than once. I've mentioned it to our rep as well.

[dgreening]

Plus 1,000,000 ups! We NEED this guys! The lack of reporting features makes it real tough to sell Casper, even though it is in fact the "best of breed" and works really well for us admins!

[BOBW]

just voted it up, thanks for the reply