Be Data Driven in IT/Ops with Snowflake

Technology changes very fast, and it keeps getting bigger and more complex. We have so many systems these days, our systems have systems. It doesn’t have to be complex and daunting to get reliable, and up-to-date data. Getting accurate data, while getting it fast, is key to developing data driven strategies. We no longer have to live in the constraints of capacity, limited storage, and limited scalability. With the power and scale of the cloud, you can now simply just ship all of your IT/Ops data to a centralized location and share it among your teams.

Spotlight is a system wide metadata indexing system that Apple has been shipping since OS X 10.4 Tiger, and has been improved over the years with each OS. I like using Spotlight for some tasks and general searching for files in Terminal.app. I also use it for finding anything on my Mac. Typically, I do not use my mouse or trackpad to find files or navigate to folders. One just needs to hit cmd + spacebar on their Mac to pull up the Spotlight search menu and start typing. If you use a Mac, there is a good chance you also use this regularly like I do. This isn’t anything groundbreaking or new, but I have enjoyed using Spotlight over the years when it fits as a good tool.

With the announcement at Catalina’s release that some third party run times will be removed, and the fact that Python 2 is end of life it is time to ship your own. Just like everything in tech, there are many ways to accomplish this. I have been using a tool for about over a year now called relocatable python.

The reasons I chose to use relocatable python were pretty good ones in my opinion. They are:

Shipping Jamf Pro Webhooks to Snowflake

Jamf Pro has a builtin feature where you have the ability to ship a webhook event when specific events happen in their application. This allows for a near real time feed of event based data which you can consume and leverage to gain insights about your fleet. Jamf provides some documentation online, found here.

Webhooks are generated automatically, and near instantly when an event occurs. In the linked documentation above you will see all the possible webhooks and sample data of what each webhook ships. There are many ways to ship webhooks, and you can choose from many paths to take. You can roll your own webhook receiver, you can ship webhooks directly to cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCP Cloud Storage), use one of many data ingestion tools, and so forth. Right now we are leveraging a tool called Fivetran. Fivetran has built in integration to many SaaS and cloud services. What tools work best for your Organization will be up to your Org to decide.

Data Sharing is Data Caring ❤️

I have come to the conclusion that there are essentially two types of people when it comes to data. The people that have data, and the people that wish they had the data. Another thought is that I would rather have the data and not need it versus need the data and not have it. For almost the past two years I have had the privilege to work for a great data platform company. The amount of data we have access to increases our return on what we do in the IT/Ops space exponentially. It also helps drive collaboration between teams, allows for centralized data sharing, and enables everyone to make data driven decisions.