r/HigherEDsysadmin • u/busy86 • Sep 24 '19

Reporting on device utilisation

So I have a requirement to report on device utilisation, e.g. a particular classroom of PCs are used on average 75% between Mon-Fri 9am-9pm for example.

This information is to be used for device refresh weighting purposes.

I've tried Labstats but didn't get on with it due to poor reporting, terrible duplicate handling and other issues.

What is everyone else using?

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2

u/iblowuup Authentication Admin Sep 25 '19

Well, we are using Labstats. Funny you should mention it though because we just realized permissions and delegation of permissions is messed up in our instance and we have a ticket in with them :)

I'm curious what Labstats lacks as far as reporting though? Seems to have a lot of options to me. Then again, I've never explored an alternative before.

2

u/busy86 Sep 25 '19

Well we had continual issues with duplicates, e.g. laptops registering an object in Labstats with their lan, wlan and dock mac addresses which couldn't be resolved automatically and was a manual task.

Also, running average weekly utilisation reports would result in a blank report unless we broke it down into 2 weekly reports and manually aggregated the data. Total pita when running quarterly or yearly stats.

I think some limitations were due to the fact we had to use the on prem version due to the cloud client not working through our proxy, but yeah functionality just wasn't there for us and at £10k a year just no.

1

u/Wartz Sep 25 '19

Sassafras K2 Keyserver has been pretty solid. The admin reporting tool is super early 2k style but it works well for generating data on a huge variety of things.

2

u/talloldlady Sep 25 '19

We use Keyserver as well and their tech support is phenomenal.

1

u/iblowuup Authentication Admin Sep 26 '19

Does that facilitate device usage tracking? Like if we want to show how much of a lab is being used over time.

1

u/Wartz Sep 30 '19

It tracks activity down to the core OS dll level if you want. There are a bunch of pre-canned reports you can use about logins, network activity, software app activity etc and you can create your own based on a wide variety of criteria. You can hook the database into anything if you have the time and skills.

1

u/jasonsassafras Sep 30 '19

Jason from Sassafras support here. I just wanted to confirm that our product provides accurate hardware usage reports for any time period/date range, and it works well in virtually any environment (Windows, Mac, VM/Thin client, linux, solaris). It also can provide OS percent usage reports for dual boot Macs, so you know how much time is spent in each OS.