Question

Assuring a Policy was Successful and not just Completed?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
April 24, 2020
3 replies
37 views

+8

fedagain
Contributor

I get a lot of "Completed" Adobe installs, sometimes MS installs also and others as well. They go undetected due to showing as Completed (dashboard).

I know some of you have ways of assuring an install was installed successfully, and if not, rerun that policy.

Please advise on how to best check installs (policies) for successful install.

I assume using some sort of check against (checksum) installed software for install is done, but how is that connected to the policy and then rerunning the policy until it's successful.

Maybe I have a greater underlying issue that needs to be resolved. So, how may of you are also seeing a lot of Adobe packages not being installed, but showing completed?

+24

mm2270
Legendary Contributor
Forum|Forum|5 years ago
April 24, 2020

This is very general, but usually what most admins do for this scenario is set the policy to a frequency of "Ongoing" and scope it to a Smart Group for devices that do NOT have the software installed. As long as the machine remains in the Smart Group, each time it checks in it will try to run the policy, until it is successful, and then (as long as you add an inventory collection at the end of your policy), the machine falls OUT of that Smart Group, and the policy no longer runs.

Keep in mind two things - while this may work for regular software that gets captured in a normal recon, it may not work as well for other items, such as scripted changes or products that don't normally show up in the regular software inventory list.
Second, you may not want a policy running over and over and over again endlessly. If there is something really wrong with either the policy or the Mac, this could end up running many many times needlessly, possibly eating up bandwidth or disrupting a user, until you realize there's an issue, which isn't very desirable. It would be so lovely if we could just make a policy run X amount of times or tries until successful, or register as a "fail" and stop trying after it reaches that attempt limit.

In fact, here's a Feature Request from way back in the wonder years of 2012 asking for something like that - https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/feature-requests/827/policy-execution-once-per-computer-if-successful
As you might have already guessed, we are still waiting for this feature. Still, might want to add your upvote to it if you agree it should work this way.