All right, in this section, I want to talk a little bit about reporting and asset management, one
of the more painful things about being an I.T. administrator is keeping track of where all of your things
are and who's using them, what shape they're in, how old they are, and all the other things that
come along with it, asset management.
So we've got some some pretty cool things that Apple remote desktop can do to aid us in that task.
And I'm just going to touch on a couple of those today.
Here's what we can do.
I'm going to start with the reports so you can select one or more machines.
I'm going to go ahead and select both the machines that I have and I'm going to hit reports.
Once I do that, I get my reports window and by default system overview report is provided and you can
click through here if you like, and expand out.
You can either just say give me everything or you can go through and just choose the things that you
want here, what's most useful for you, what's not.
So depending on your circumstances, you may want to modify this to see, you know, what kinds of things
you'd want to collect from all of your machines in your in your environment.
So we'll go ahead and take the defaults here just for today.
To give you the example, I will point out one thing here, remote desktop.
It also includes these computer and phone number one, two, three and four.
Now, we've not been using one to know.
We've been using two, three and four.
So I'm just going to remove that.
But we have been using number one because it has that asset tag that's on my device.
So I may want to have a report that gives me the asset tag, the serial number, the model number and
a number of other things.
So I'm going to go ahead and make sure that selected and I'm just going to hit get report.
It's going to start working on this, collecting that report.
Collecting the information from both machines and they both succeeded.
Now it provides me with this little window and this is kind of nice if I need the information real fast.
And there's a couple different ways you can do this.
But if I want to do this, oh, I just need to have this information right in front of me right now.
And when I'm done looking at it, I'm closing and I don't need it.
So that gives you this you all.
That's very nice.
Set up in tabs.
You can click through each one of these things section separately or you can see it all at once across
the top.
But oftentimes that's not really what we need.
Really need is some sort of report because there's probably someone somewhere that wants a copy of our
computer inventory for some sort of thing that they're working on.
So what I'm going to do there instead is export it.
So this gives me the option here to hit export and I'm going to go ahead field separate, which is common.
Com here.
This is the default.
Go ahead and save it to my desktop.
And what I've got now is I basically have a text file here that's that's Comedy Limited, so I'm going
to take an application like Microsoft Excel and I'm going to open this in Excel.
And I'm just going to step through here, so, yeah, it's limited and it's a Macintosh file format
and it's not have it's actually comma.
So you can see as we do that it's starting to build our columns.
And we're going to go ahead and just do this in the general column format.
And now that it's completed, I'm just going to highlight the top here, separate that out the headings
from the rest of it.
But now as I click through here, now I have my information and I can move things around and rearrange
this as well.
But now I'm actually seeing here my model machines, RAM.
WI fi Mac addresses and I go all the way down here to computer information, number one, and I can
change that here and actually say fixed asset tag.
So now that I've got all of this information here in a format like Excel, I can print this, I can
save this, I can send it to the person who was looking for I can maintain it from my records and I
can run this over and over again any time that I want to update with this with the latest information
that I have.
All right, let's look at another report that you might use, some of the hit reports again and into
the system overview report, I'm going to choose a software version report, and that's going to allow
me to compare the version of the software on my computer with the version of the applications on a remote
computer.
So I'm going to take airport utility, for example, and I'm just going to select that.
I can do up to 10 different applications.
So I'll just go ahead and select airport utility and I'm just going to go ahead and run it against the
one machine and I'll hit generate report.
And here we go so we can see that I'm actually running the same version of airport on this machine as
I am on the other one.
So this allow me to to really look at I've got certain applications in my environment that I need to
make sure are all on the same version.
This gives me a tool to very quickly audit all those machines on the network and find out if I need
to update them or if they actually are running the same version that I am or the latest version in that
case.
All right, one other report that we may want to do is.
The file search.
So I'm not going to run this because it can take some amount of time, but you can actually go in here
and put in something like a word and you can say maybe matches or is or ends with or whatever and say
parent path, footpath extension.
There's so many different options here that you can choose if you're looking for a particular file file
type or a missing file that could have been on various different machines in your environment.
So this is a very powerful tool for searching for four files.
If someone so user calls you and tells you that they are pretty sure they saved a file on their machine,
but they have no idea where it was saved and they kind of know what it is.
And so you have to go to the machine and sit there and wait for it to search.
You can go ahead and have a already do that for you using this.
So pretty neat, pretty neat tool for that.
And there are a lot of other reports that you can run.
And I'm not going to go through each of these, but I would recommend that you take some time to just
familiarize yourself with what's possible and start to think about how can I use a card to cut down
on some of that manual tasks that I'm spending a lot of time doing when it's talking about data collection
or asset management or those kinds of things and leverage the report options that Apple's built into
to your advantage.