Anyone familiar with SW CAD Admin Dashboard?

[JuTu]

Well... as the subject sets.

Do you or someone at your company use the SolidWorks CAD Admin Dashboard?

We are in a process to try to determine what is our general baseline regarding our hardware, methods of CADding, etc. to figure out how we could develop our functions and workflows in not so far future.

How you use accounts aka workstations in Admin Dashboard? How and when Dashboard collects data from users? Is it possible to force the data collection to collect current situation of workstations? Does it need Rx to be started and closed or what?

I'd be grateful to hear any comments. To me the Help documentation is... lacking.

Thanks in advance!

[the_h4mmer]

So when I gained access to our Admin Dashboard, the information populated was from several years back. I think (100% speculation) after moving to server licensing, the Admin Dashboard doesn't do much, if you have web licensing I think it becomes active. Not sure about the rest, but it would be nice to have controls via that dashboard!

[JSculley]

I think (100% speculation) after moving to server licensing, the Admin Dashboard doesn't do much, if you have web licensing I think it becomes active.

Th dashboard is still active. We are still using SW2017 here and none of those machines show up anymore, but I have a 2022 test machine that does show up. And the same test machine shows up for all the releases between 2017 and 2022 as well. According to the SW Knowledge Base (S-S-060447) a machine will show up once SW is run while connected to the internet. And:

"Crash data and runtime errors will be displayed once this data has been sent back to SOLIDWORKS® (Please enable the ‘SolidWorks Customer Experience Improvement Program option’: Tools > Options > System Options > General). Crashes will be uploaded immediately and non-crash data will upload automatically at least once per week. Users MUST have active subscription service and a Customer Portal account."

Before SW2017 became too old, all the machines here would show up. And each user does not need to have a portal account. I set up my email address in the admin image for activation so that only I get emails about updates and such and it allowed me to see all the machines.

[Berickson]

You don't need to have online licensing for it to work, we have network licenses. My understanding is that you have to have the "Help make SOLIDWORKS products better..." setting turned on in the System Options so it'll send the session details back to SOLIDWORKS.

I use it to get a feeling for overall stability after upgrades and after we make large systematic changes to validate whether we're actually seeing improvements. I've also used it to look out for unsupported graphics drivers that we run into regularly. It only stores the last 60 days worth of sessions though so I usually export the data monthly.

[bnemec]

I'm familiar enough with it to know that it's not all that reliable. It's another partially functional tool in the Admin's toolbox. We have only ever used 2019, admin install image set the "send feedback to sw" box and here's an overview.
- secrete handshake to get logged into Customer Portal.
- some workstations do not show up
- some workstations show up several times (only showing each hostname once may or may not show the most recent)
- seems to accurately show the GPU model and driver, which is nice as these tend to be changed psudo-randomly. But I tend to go to the network location where my add-in copies the CXPA from all the workstations.
- kinda nice for checking space on SSD
- take it all with a grain of salt because the data integrity is lacking. Don't think of it as real-time data, more like some-time data.

My favorite memory of using the admin dashboard is when we were several months into a support case with Solidworks, through our VAR, and it was a lot of goose chasing. SW would as for one thing, we'd get that data then they'd ask for something else. On and on it was going as weeks went by until they asked for workstation data, we send CXPAs or something and another list, but that wasn't what the SW tech support wanted. Pretty much, "go fish". I couldn't understand what they wanted so now it's like dealing with health insurance where you just keep changing something and resubmitting the claim over and over. Nearly as a joke, thinking to myself "This cannot be what they're asking for" I exported the data, "all accounts" to Excel and sent it in. Response, "Thank you, that's exactly what we were looking for." I flipped out. I literally had to go to the company's website to get data to send to the company. My point, if Solidworks Tech support needs information about your work stations you can go to the Admin Portal to download it from Solidworks and send it back to them.

[Frederick_Law]

LOL dog don't know its tail.

The dashboard doesn't collect everything consistently.
Usually won't pick up computer unless it a new install.
It'll be faster and easier to ask everyone run RX, benchmark and save screenshot.

[JuTu]

Thanks everyone!

Yesterday we published updated settings package for all users to enable the Customer Experience Improvment thingy. Now I will sit and wait to see the results.

I can see so far two accounts from about 20+ expected shown in the Dashboard when I've chosen the current major SolidWorks version. Then there is like 50+ accounts under SW2018 which we have upgraded to SW2020 more than a year ago.

Wait and see... wait and see.

[Frederick_Law]

Wait and see... wait and see.

Don't hold your breath .....

[JuTu]

I found a four part series of blog posts by CATI about the CAD Admin Dashboard:
https://www.cati.com/blog/using-the-sol ... -part-1-1/
https://www.cati.com/blog/using-the-sol ... nes-part2/
https://www.cati.com/blog/using-the-sol ... es-part-3/
https://www.cati.com/blog/using-the-sol ... es-part-4/

I'll link them here for others to find them easier.