Tracking Chrome devices

[synaesthesia]

Morning,

 

I'm struggling to keep track of our Chrome devices, and none of the systems we have in place seem to make life very easy, starting with Google itself.

So for example if there's a Chromebook we're trying to find - we know it's serial number and can obviously see what it is in Workspace. However that's pretty much the limit.

I think from some point last year something changed in Workspace and we no longer see any hardware information on the device tab, particularly pertinent stuff like the MAC address or last known IP.  All the hardware info blank. We no longer get last user information either.

The idea would have been that with the MAC address, we can look on our wifi system (UniFi) to get last known locations, if it was on site.

 

This shouldn't have been the end of the world as we have Impero, but since getting the new version it gives us even less information than before. Devices don't have a name any more, just "username - Chromebook". No IPs, no MAC, just an "Impero host ID" which is meaningless. Inventory can give a tiny bit more info but only if they're on site and turned on. Again, no MAC address.

 

This means that tracking lost devices is nearly impossible. Any thoughts that might be of help please?

 

 

[TheHyperTechie]

Are these 1:1 chromebooks? or class sets?

 

We asset tag ours (even the non 1:1) this makes them trackable to at least the classroom. I then add the asset tag number, and serial number for the device within the admin console/Parago and this is how we identify them.

 

If we have the asset number, we can then go into the admin console, find the device and look at the recent user activity/who's logged in. A while ago I used something in GAM to find a recent user from a serial number, very powerful tool.

Edited October 23, 2025 by HyperTech

[synaesthesia]

It's a mixture of both, the problem is that Google seem to have removed the tools or something has changed to stop that information being shown or recorded.  They are of course asset tagged and that's recorded in Google, but that doesn't help physically track the devices

I haven't seen anything hardware related to GAM, I'll investigate that as it often is the only way to get anything useful from Google. Awful process

 

[machy]

Has something turned off / licence expired / are they uptodate?

 

Just checked our portal and can see WAN IP & MAC on devices that haven't been on in a while

WAN, LAN, MAC on (on) devices 

Latest user on all of them 

 

 

RE the name, not sure if i am getting mixed with Senso and it was something i looked at as we were moving from impero, but i know if you didn't set the "Asset ID" what showed in the console was gibberish 

[synaesthesia]

2 minutes ago, machy said:

Has something turned off / licence expired / are they uptodate?

 

Just checked our portal and can see WAN IP & MAC on devices that haven't been on in a while

WAN, LAN, MAC on (on) devices 

Latest user on all of them 

 

 

RE the name, not sure if i am getting mixed with Senso and it was something i looked at as we were moving from impero, but i know if you didn't set the "Asset ID" what showed in the console was gibberish 

Yeah bang up to date, all licensed (perpetual chrome upgrades). May well be some setting somewhere but I can't find anything that correlates to that info being stored

Will check out the asset ID thing with Impero, it won't help us with this issue but it will at least fix one annoyance!

[machy]

Maybe these settings?

 

[paulkerton]

We use Lightspeed Systems for filtering etc, so we get their Device Detective tool as part of it

https://www.lightspeedsystems.com/en_uk/solutions/security-compliance/device-location-services/

[synaesthesia]

1 hour ago, machy said:

Maybe these settings?

 

Nail, head. Cheers @machy! Someone must have changed the setting at root level for our trust and didn't tell anyone - I must have looked past this setting several times and completely missed it. A proper "man look" clearly!

[dhicks]

3 hours ago, synaesthesia said:

I haven't seen anything hardware related to GAM, I'll investigate that as it often is the only way to get anything useful from Google.

 

We have a script run nightly that uses GAM to export a bunch of data about ChromeOS devices, then parses that data to get the most recent user and adds that to a spreadsheet. We keep the who-used-this-device data for a month, which can be handy if a child wanders off with another child's Chromebook.

[synaesthesia]

1 hour ago, dhicks said:

 

We have a script run nightly that uses GAM to export a bunch of data about ChromeOS devices, then parses that data to get the most recent user and adds that to a spreadsheet. We keep the who-used-this-device data for a month, which can be handy if a child wanders off with another child's Chromebook.

Had a play with GAM - it reports the same as what we get in the UI now the correct options are available - however, very handy as an overall audit facility!

I can't get it to query to an OU though, only the predefined queries for things like serial numbers, asset tags etc but this is definitely a Me Error:

 

gam print cros allfields query "havent_a_clue_but_probably_cros_ous_and_children:someargumenthere" > output.csv

User related syntax error

 

[mikes]

We change the option in g-suite  to change the machines network name (the name that shows up in the DHCP system etc) - so it has the machines serial numbers / asset tags, but we've always had problems with them showing up on Impero as separate devices -   I think because they are enrolled to a different domain than what we sign in with (they are Hwb Wales devices but we have our own domain) - they only report the username not the device name

[jthompson]

We set the hostnames of our Chromebooks to include the asset tag. That makes them easier to find on the day in local DHCP.

 

We also wrote a custom Chrome extension that collects the current device hostname and username and posts them every 20mins to an AppSheet app., giving us a timstamped history of which users have been using which devices. A Chrome extension seemed like to only way to really achieve that.

[synaesthesia]

I did not know this was possible - many thanks all, every day is a school day!

[Danp]

On 24/10/2025 at 13:42, jthompson said:

We set the hostnames of our Chromebooks to include the asset tag. That makes them easier to find on the day in local DHCP.

 

We also wrote a custom Chrome extension that collects the current device hostname and username and posts them every 20mins to an AppSheet app., giving us a timstamped history of which users have been using which devices. A Chrome extension seemed like to only way to really achieve that.

 

I like the sound of this. Is it something you would be willing to share?

[jthompson]

20 hours ago, Danp said:

 

I like the sound of this. Is it something you would be willing to share?

Potentially, although I'd need to go back through it all to make sure it's generalised enough to share. I can't rememeber how it handles the AppSheet API key, for instance, so I wouldn't want to accidentally share that. There are quite a lot of different moving parts to it: setting up the AppSheet app, the Chrome extension and all the hoops required to get that deployable, setting up a Google shared drive to hold txt logs longer term and a few little bits of Apps Script to automate stuff (e.g. emptying out the AppSheet data daily, due to storage limits for Sheets files).

I may have documented it all in exquisite detail, but there are probably some gaps as we were hacking it together until it worked.

[Danp]

28 minutes ago, jthompson said:

Potentially, although I'd need to go back through it all to make sure it's generalised enough to share. I can't rememeber how it handles the AppSheet API key, for instance, so I wouldn't want to accidentally share that. There are quite a lot of different moving parts to it: setting up the AppSheet app, the Chrome extension and all the hoops required to get that deployable, setting up a Google shared drive to hold txt logs longer term and a few little bits of Apps Script to automate stuff (e.g. emptying out the AppSheet data daily, due to storage limits for Sheets files).

I may have documented it all in exquisite detail, but there are probably some gaps as we were hacking it together until it worked.

 

I'm sure there is quite a bit of unpicking to do! We used to have Chromebook Getter, which sounds very much like what you have created.