Is there a way where I can track how many users are using WR vs new Reports? Maybe parse login logs or something.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the most proactive user community and while we have been encouraging them to start using the new Reports UI, no idea if they are, If they are and there were issues, we would have heard about it so the silence may mean that either they are and new Reports is doing well OR it can just as easy mean that nobody bothered to read the encouragements and continue to use WR only…
In my experience, I’ve never had to query or track Web Reports (WR) usage, even while working in organizations with endpoints ranging from 20,000 to 200,000. The main reason is that WR isn’t widely used by operators. Most of the time, customers rely on custom reports delivered to their email inboxes or pull the required information directly from the BigFix Console. Only a small group of users actively interacts with Web Reports.
That being said, I’ve always found WR to be a great tool, whether for its default reporting or out-of-the-box features. However, its interface and functionality haven’t evolved much over time, which has likely contributed to its limited adoption compared to custom solutions or direct console usage.
Yes, you are correct. To obtain login information for Web Reports, we can implement logic to analyze audit logs and specifically parse entries related to Web Reports activity. As far as I know, there isn’t any built-in functionality within the product to achieve this directly.
As for the adoption of the new Reports UI, I think version dependency plays a big role. For example, my lab environment runs BigFix v11.0.3, which is the minimum required version for the new Web Reports UI. However, my production infrastructure is still on v11.0.1 or v11.0.2, which I believe is the case for many other organizations too. Because of this, the usage of the new Reports UI is still very limited.
I get that and for WR alone it made sense because there was very little you couldn’t “email” to end-users, so there was no need to be using the UI that much. With BigFix Reports though that is not the case and essentially the intention with playlists, graphical widgets and so on is to provide much better and more interactive UI which automatically means people have to use the UI and not rely on the scheduled reports only.
That said, where I am getting to is we need to prepare for the eventual cutoff whenever that will be, so we need a way to check how widely is one used vs the other, and respectively track that historically (i would expect over time the trend to show that more and more users use the new tool vs the old one). In fact, as we near the cutoff I would expect a way to change the “default context” too - i.e. have a configuration to make “BigFix Reports” loaded by default and within it to have a link to launch “WR” if they really want to go there. The decision then of when each individual BigFIx user wants to change the default will be their own and assuming we have the tracking suggested above that shows us let’s say 80% users use BigFix Reports over 20% WR over the last month, it is quite an easy decision to make but if percentages are reverse then it clearly indicates to us as administrators we have some work to do to prepare our users for it…
Either way, those are the tools required to ensure smooth transition to end users and it is a new thing we need to prepare for sooner or later (we never had to do anything like that with WR in the past)…