Enhancing Super Status Reporting in Jamf Pro

Tonyyoung
Contributor

Originally Posted to Patch Notes and Progress

I work within a highly regulated enterprise environment, and so, maintaining visibility into the macOS update workflow is critical. Whether for compliance reporting, proactive remediation, or general fleet health, knowing exactly what’s happening during an update—on every device—is a necessity, not a luxury. Many organizations like my own make use of super, an amazing tool designed and maintained by Kevin White (aka Macjutsu).

I’ve previously written about various ways organizations can develop a configuration strategyfor super depending on the industry and need.

A significant change in the 5.1.0 release is the introduction of a new, condensed audit log file, located at:

/Library/Management/super/logs/super-audit.log

This file now contains only the most important status events—installation events, workflow target changes, deadline adjustments, successful workflow completions, and any other event that dramatically alters the SUPERMAN workflow. With this new audit log file comes a new extension attribute to capture these status events in Jamf Pro so that admins may see a glimpse into the timeline of events that super goes through on a local device that extends beyond the initial installation process that policy logs may show. That extension attribute can be found here on GitHub [super-Audit-Log-Jamf-Pro-EA.sh].

This enhanced version not only aligns with best practices but also simplifies troubleshooting and remediation efforts. With these welcomed enhancements, it still so happened that a need arose, within my own work and in other organizations, to better group systems to pinpoint those that may need…. some extra love.

To address that, I’ve developed a set of three complementary Jamf Pro Extension Attributes that work together to surface Super’s status data in a format IT teams can use immediately, while fitting in nicely with the other useful extension attributes that presently exist for super.

All three Extension Attributes can be found on my Github: https://github.com/tonyyo11/MacAdministration

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1 REPLY 1

Jordy-Thery
Contributor III

Nice one @Tonyyoung! Much appreciated.