Disk usage alarms via Casper?

Don,
just create a Smart Group on the JSS with the needed criteria and enable the notifications for it.
You just need to setup the smtp information on the server. As clients fall into that criteria, the server will send out the notification accordingly.

There is a notifications section under each user account in the JSS where you can customize notifications but I don't see one when a certain policy executes. However, you can use dummy receipts to accomplish this, and the run reports off the policy logs.

This is what we do and I was just E-mailed this morning about a machine over
85% usage. You'll need to make sure you're regularly inventorying your
machines to keep the JSS up-to-date. Otherwise, information remains static
in the JSS and you won't be notified.

Don,

The easiest way is to setup a SMART group to handle this.

Under the storage section, select the "Boot drive full" to "more than"
85

Check the "send email notification on change" and that will handle the
notifications if they are enabled on the server.

Jason Weber
Technology Support Cluster Specialist
Certified Casper Administrator
Independent School District 196
jason.weber at district196.org

<rant>

Correct, and this drives me to no end that it’s not granular enough on notifications to specific anything in the JSS.

It’s all or nothing for anyone you enable email notifications for. So now those users you want to just get this smart group change they get them all, etc.

What I’ve done thus far is have these notifications go to an email account I manage and then create exchange forwarding rules based on the subject line of the particular email. I shouldn’t have to do that...

</rant>

Craig E

The only thing I will say, is database performance is affected by many
different factors, and if you have a ton of smart groups it can affect
MySQL performance. I try to only use smart groups for management, and I
use policy logs for reports instead of smart groups or advance searches. That is just me, but if you have the horsepower then by all means do
whatever you can however you want.

Just my 2 cents

Tom

You do have the ability to determine which types of notifications each user receives.
Are you wanting to see smart groups have the capability of defining notifications on a per group basis so different group notifications would be received by different users?

Hiya Lance!

Hope you’re doing well.

I am very well aware of the ability to determine which broad areas of notifications each user or group in the JSS gets. Not a problem.

Here’s a specific use case scenario for you, the one specific to my email rules actually.

There are two distinct areas of support based on where a machine is located on our campus. In many JSS installs this is even greater, by building typically or geographic location. In our case there are LABS computers and OFFICE computers. Two different groups of people do direct support of these areas and triage machine issues, I’m just the overall guy who breaks it all. =)

Let’s say I have a Smart Group that updates at night telling me that Lab machines haven’t checked in with the JSS in 2 days, another group that Office machines haven’t checked in for 14 days. I would want the Lab group notifications to go to the Lab responsible people and the Office group notifications to the Office responsible people. I currently can not do that. These folks get enough information as it is so it’s really important that I only send them what’s important to them so they don’t start ignoring messages by human nature.

What’s even better...I might want a particular group notification or policy status to go to someone totally not configured in my system.

Does that help?

Thanks!

P.S. I would also like to applaud JAMF for the greater amount of response to this list they’ve given as of late, official or not.

Craig E

Outstanding. Thanks Craig.
That translated nicely into a feature request to support.

Thanks Lance, Thomas, William, Jason and Craig,

As always, thanks for the great advice!

Smart Groups sounds like a good idea, but to Thomas' point regarding MySQL impact, is there a risk that too many smart groups would slow things down in JSS?

PS, would increasing RAM on the JSS box help MySQL? The reason I ask is that I'm spec'ing out a new JSS for one of our client locations that can handle 2000 Macs.

Thanks,
Don

Well,

We have over 6,000 clients hitting the JSS all the time. Our JSS is a dual quad core Xeon Xserve with 24 gigs of RAM, 16gigs allocated to Tomcat. Before we only had 8gigs of RAM and the sql queries were appending our server pretty bad. Once I upgraded the RAM and tweaked it a bit we are down to average load of 5% total usage of CPU and at most it will spike up to about 40%.

In the past I have had issues where certain policies could not flush due to the max packet size being smaller than the actual policy logs and my database bloating into 20 and even 30 gigs in size. Due to the nature of me having so many systems in my deployment I had to tweak it a bit. Of course your mileage will vary because there are like a billion factors to take in regarding your performance. Which is why as a rule of best practice, here at my work, I try to use smart groups only for management purposes and not inventory purposes.

You will have to test it out and see what happens

Thanks Thomas! That's very helpful. I saw the previous threads about allocating more RAM to Tomcat. We do something similar with Xinet so the Venture database (also MySQL). Is there a tech note on how to give Tomcat more RAM?

Thanks,
Don

If you just edit the tomcat plist and put the amount of ram in megs, so 16gigs would be 16384m. Just edit the plist under /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.tomcat.jamfsoftware.plist with nano or pico and edit the lines that look like this

<string>-Xms1024m</string> <string>-Xmx16384m</string>

The Xmx string is the maximum amount of RAM you want TomCat to use. You'll need to restart TomCat afterward and you can do so by doing sudo jssutil rt, which is not documented and there is no manual for the jssutil command - yet.

Of course you need to be careful and make sure your server can handle everything and if all else fails just reinstall tomcat from the JSS setup utility. Also, keep in mind if anyone uses the JSS setup utility for any type of TomCat tweaking it will revert it back to the presets of only allowing a maximum of 8gigs. I am also not sure how well Jamf supports these configurations, so you may want to consult them as well.

-Tom

Thanks for the info! I added it to my notes so I'll check with the JAMF SE for the supported setting, and we'll be ready when the new server is built.

Don

Are you on 10.6 server? I am on 10.5.8 and that may or may not make a difference?

I wonder if the jssutil command line is up to snuff with 10.6. You may update it, then restart it using launchctl instead, which I am assuming under the hood is what the jssutil command does anyway.

10.5.8 fully updated, JSS is at 7.1 (will update to latest after JAMF certify CS5).

Don

Ok, for one of our clients, we increased the RAM on the JSS server from 2G to 16G. The hope is to allocate 12G of RAM to Tomcat.

I vi'd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist and replaced this string:

<string>-Xmx512m</string>

...to 12G:

<string>-Xmx12252m</string>

Then I tried to restart Tomcat using:

sudo jssutil rt

Tomcat appeared to restart in Terminak, but JSS was unresponsive, so I launched JSS Setup Utility.app and started Tomcat again there. Tomcat was being a PITA, the Start Tomcat button wasn't doing its job. So I ended up having to reboot the server to get Tomcat running again.

I noticed that simply launching "JSS Setup Utility.app" reverts the RAM allocation back to 2048M. Bummer. I hesitate to repeat the above, since at any point it can revert back. Is there a plan for JAMF to upgrade their tool so the maximum RAM allocation can be based on the available amount of RAM on the JSS server box? We upgraded to 16G of RAM to give Tomcat some headroom...but it looks like it's a crapshoot getting the setting to stick. :)

Don

Are you sure about that? If I launch the JSS Setup Util and modify something and then go back into terminal and open up that plist file the values are still there

Hi Tom,

Yep...here are the steps I followed to give Tomcat 12G out of the installed 16G of RAM on the server:

1. I cat the file and find the current values:

   bash-3.2# cat /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist | grep "<string>-Xm"
   <string>-Xms480m</string>
   <string>-Xmx2048m</string>

2. I vi the file to change these strings to increase min to 2048 (2G) and max to 12288 (12G).

3. I cat the file to make sure the settings are right:

   bash-3.2# cat /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist | grep "<string>-Xm"
   <string>-Xms2048m</string>
   <string>-Xmx12288m</string>

4. Cool...now I restart Tomcat by command line:

   jssutil rt

5. I check, JSS is not working. I launch "JSS Setup Utility.app" and see that the Web Application is red (not loading).

6. I hit "Start Tomcat", and JSS starts up again.

7. I cat the file again and find:

   bash-3.2# cat /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist | grep "<string>-Xm"
   <string>-Xms256m</string>
   <string>-Xmx512m</string>

8. So I end up going back in to "JSS Setup Utility.app" and sliding the bars to 1024 minimum, 2048 maximum.

I'm going to cut my losses for now and leave it set by the GUI so at least it's at 2048. Would like to resolve this, so Tomcat can get more RAM, but from what I've read on this forum, JAMF doesn't really support tinkering with Tomcat RAM allocation. For our company, if we implement unsupported tweaks and something goes wrong, we'll have big problems. Hoping JAMF can release a new "JSS Setup Utility.app" with higher values, it really should "know" how much RAM you have installed and allow you to set (for example) 12G out of 16G that is installed. :)

Don

Don,

I can tell you this much: running Casper 7.21 on 10.6 Snow Leopard Server,
you can set the maximum RAM allocation for Tomcat to 8GB with the JSS Setup
utility.

I don't know the underlying mechanics for sure, but I do know that clicking
"Start Tomcat" in the GUI passes the command:

/usr/sbin/jssutil startTomcat -min <min value set in GUI> -max <max value
set in GUI> -permGenMax <max value> -permGenMin <min value>

So I'm not really surprised that your plist settings were changed with a GUI
launch - it would appear (and would make sense from a "simplified user" POV)
that the values are re-written when Tomcat is launched.

At any rate, if you can get your system current & run Tomcat in 64-bit mode,
you'll get access to much more than 2GB of RAM.

Christopher Kemp
CNN Central Engineering

I just now edited my com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist file and then launched the JSS setup utility and did a database check and then quit it. It did not modify my settings. Running Casper 7.2 on OS X Server 10.5.8...

My server is set to use 16gigs of RAM for Tomcat and the other 8gigs for the OS and processes (java and mysql).

Very strange

Hi Chris,
"Kemp, Chris" <chris.kemp at turner.com> wrote:

Sorry for the late response. The server is actually the first Intel Xserve (2006) which won't do 64 bit. Now that we've increased the RAM on this particular server (from 2G > 16G), is to upgrade the box to Snow Leopard ad JSS to 7.2.1. Then we'll see where we're at, I'll report back.

Thanks,
Don