Best tool for who is logging into what Chromebook?

[mfoley]

What is the the best way to get a list of what users are logging into what Chromebooks across the entire organization My assigned inventory is outdated and I am looking to get a easy to read list on who is logging into what Chromebook. 

[Scott]

If you have access to the investigation tool in google admin, you can run a "chrome log event" report with a filter for chromeos login/unlock and start there.  Otherwise CDW/Amplified IT has a product called Gopher for Chrome that helps track device session data.  It's a subscription service but the price is pretty reasonable.

*edit:  forgot to mention, for google admin you'll want to make sure that device telemetry reporting is turned on for your device OU.  in case it is not already.

[asearles]

GAM can pull reports of a device's recent users pretty easily:

gam print cros query "id:YOUR_SERIAL_NUMBER" fields serialnumber,model,lastSync,recentUsers

[Scott]

The one thing I don't like about the recentuser info is I don't think it shows the actual dates.  But you did inspire me to check for another substitute in gam.  Looks like this is approximate equivalent of my investigation tool suggestion (replace 'start -7d' with your report timeframe, or you can also use 'thismonth')

gam redirect csv .\ChromeLogins.csv report chrome events CHROMEOS_AFFILIATED_UNLOCK_SUCCESS,CHROME_OS_LOGIN_EVENT start -7d

[asearles]

Nice!  Thanks for sharing that.  I'm curious about filtering it to a single device.  I might try to look into that later.

[NielsBrockmeier]

You are right, it just shows the last 10 sessions or something and the last 10 users, but that last users might be used for all 10 sessions or it can be 1 session for every 1 user. 
I wish Google could make that a bit more clear, as well as seeing when a user signs into the Chromebook from the user profile and not just NEW signins

[mfoley]

Thanks! I was getting no results and then I seen your previous comment and had to enable telemetry reporting.. Going to see how it looks next week. 

[Kim_Nilsson]

Hiya @Scott 

Filtering those specific events I got zero activities.

If I grab all events (by just not mentioning any events) I get lots of activities, but none of them are for unlock or login. I checked the API docs and they are valid events. I'm just not getting any, at all.

I have everything reporting on max levels and as often as possible.

My mistake.

Hmmm, it was not possible to restrict the report to a single OU with a simple insert of "ou /Students/School1" between chrome and events, as the gam wiki suggests.

Using select ou /Students/School1 in that position, I am getting results. We'll see what it ends up as, after it has slowly walked through all 300+ users. 🙂

Alright, that worked.

gam redirect csv ./ChromeLogins.csv report chrome select ou "/Students/School1" events CHROMEOS_AFFILIATED_UNLOCK_SUCCESS,CHROME_OS_LOGIN_EVENT start -7d

That gives us a list of logins, with DEVICE_NAME in the third column (and it looks an awful lot like a serial number 😎) and id.time in another column. With that, you can resort the data based on serial and time.

If you have a large organisation, you may want to split your data into files per OU, as my list for seven days and 300 students gave me 2430 rows.

More efficient.

Of course, you can let GAM filter some irrelevant columns for you, if you like, and then cram more users into the same file. We want some of the following columns.

DEVICE_NAME, id.time, DEVICE_USER, ORG_UNIT_NAME, name, UNLOCK.TYPE, type

This looks a nice expanded GAM command to remove some clutter, and order the data, a little bit.

gam config csv_output_header_filter "DEVICE_NAME,id.time,DEVICE_USER,ORG_UNIT_NAME,name,UNLOCK.TYPE,type" redirect csv ./ChromeLogins.csv report chrome events CHROMEOS_AFFILIATED_UNLOCK_SUCCESS,CHROME_OS_LOGIN_EVENT start -7d

 Ordering the data wasn't possible (with that command), but it filtered everything nicely.

I got a nice csv with 33k rows for a little over 6k users, where about 4k of them use CBs.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Well, not to toot my own horn (or, exactly that! 😂), I have on occasion referred to my own tool, CB_Inventory.

Free, open source and not doing what E.T. always wanted*.

Here you get a list of the most recent user, which is the only valid reference with regards to the date and time of last access. As has been mentioned, the rest of the list of recent accesses are not and can not be attributed to individual users.

*For those too young to get the reference.
In the movie E.T., the alien wanted to "phone home" to communicate with his family.
The data in CB_Inventory is yours alone, and the only communication is between Google and you.