Talk Me Into Using Blueprints...

I can’t comment on future releases (don’t want to promise something I can’t), but it’s fair to say blueprints is still evolving. Configuration profiles shouldn’t go away until blueprints can replace all the payloads.

I’ll include scoping in that too.

I would suggest using blueprints as much as possible, because they are the way forward (i.e. declarative management is Apple’s way forward).

It might not work for everyone, but you can create a static computer group for exceptions and add that to your smart group as a criterion. Instead of adjusting the scope of your blueprint, you’d be adjusting the static group.

Thanks, ​@talkingmoose! I definitely want to use declarative device management, so I genuinely do want to be talked into it. Ha. If I do I probably will use that static group approach. Just feels clunky. I have the same issue with App Installers. It’s very frustrating that the scoping options are smart group or bust.

I should add, if you live near one of the U.S. cities where we’re hosting a Jamf Nation Live roadshow over the next few weeks, be sure to attend. This will be an opportunity to get a glimpse of some things to come.

​@talkingmoose Ok, I created a Blueprint this morning for Software Update Settings and deployed it to two smart groups totaling 29 devices as a test. The early results show 20 succeeded, 8 pending, and 1 error, but there doesn’t seem to be any way in the Jamf Pro UI to see which devices are in each of those statuses. I could manually look through the inventory records of 29 devices without too much time, but if I had a scope of 1,000 devices, that would be a needle in a haystack. So what is Jamf’s recommendation in this scenario?

Love that Dave Chappelle episode…. But in all seriousness, it just takes a mindset change. It has worked very well for us for updates. We were able to update over 90% of our fleet with it whereas, let’s just say “older methods” would take us over 60 days to hit that benchmark. 
 

We did have to posture around the scoping with some static/smart group magic. But once you understand the how, it works very well. 

Oh and side note - controlling safari extensions is something you can only do in blueprints. 

I’d love to be able to use Blueprints, but alas:

Not available for Jamf Premium Cloud Plus or StateRAMP environments.

​@john_sherrod Reporting in the GUI is in the works. No ETA to share at the moment, but earlier this week we opened the Jamf platform API beta to everyone. It’s public now.

API development work generally needs completing before we can present GUi front-ends, so a lot of the work is done.

I’m not sure how comfortable you are with REST APIs (should be very similar to Jamf Pro’s REST API) or scripting, but you may find this useful in the meantime while the rest is underway.

​@talkingmoose Thanks! I’m not comfortable with REST APIs, but I’m aware that I should become more comfortable with them. BUT in the meantime I did create a test software update Blueprint for our IT Macs, and also created a general one that I’m testing on a larger group of non-IT Macs. I also moved our Apple TV management entirely over to Blueprints since that was easiest device category to move, and I’ve also largely moved our iOS/iPadOS devices over as well. Baby steps! I’m VERY glad to hear that there will be GUI reporting coming eventually.

I haven’t tried it but this might be worth a look: https://snelson.us/2026/02/ddm-status-from-csv-1-3-0/

​@Bretterson Thanks! I did stumble upon that the other day. Don’t love it, but glad someone has created something to fill the gap until we get better GUI reporting from Jamf.

Agreed with all. I love Blueprints over here, but the initial rollout was slow specifically to catch these errors. In our case, they’re mostly conflict with other custom configuration profiles.

I will say that the AI assistant spit out a script for me to try pulling errors out of the API and it did mostly work… but not usably. Gotta give it +1 for giving good best practice recommendations and warnings. 

•Very excited for the Public API beta!