Alert system user on smart group change?

tkessler
New Contributor II

I'm sure the infrastructure is in the JSS to do this. Would it be possible to have the JSS send an email alert to the user account in inventory (that under "User and Location") for a Mac whenever that specific Mac is added to or removed from a certain smart group?

Under the User and Location email, we could easily have a listing of the smart groups with checkboxes. Those checked will send the user an email (generic, or based on a customizable template) that will warn that user of the change. This is useful for things like alerting that one's hard drive is filling to capacity, is experiencing SMART failures, has been out of contact (ie, at someone's home) and needs to be brought back to the work network, may need to be backed up, need to be brought in to an IT room for management (e.g., to have an OS upgrade applied after so many days of that upgrade being available to the public)....etc.

2 REPLIES 2

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

Hi, I'm not sure if your post is in the spirit of a Feature Request suggestion, or just a question. If its a question, then, no, as far as I know, there's nothing in the JSS to send an email on a group change to only the one user, assigned to that Mac. The problem is, right now the settings are such that when a preference is checked to receive Smart Group changes within an account imported into the JSS, that user will receive all Smart Group changes that have the box labeled "Send email notification on membership change" See screenshot:
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So this means if the above checkbox is on for a Smart Group, any account that also has the following check enabled for their account in the JSS under the Email Notifications section
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will receive the above Smart Group change email notices, even if their Mac is not part of that group. There isn't a way from the JSS that I know of to make sure they only get Smart Group changes when something on their Mac has changed, but not others. If there is some way to do this that I don't know about, I'd love for someone to educate me.

What you could do however, is have a policy scoped to the Smart Groups you've mentioned that will run a policy/script on their Mac to send them an email. Basically, the computer can send an email to the user logged in to it, assuming your users log in with AD accounts or the info in the User & Location section is correctly populated on their Macs and retrievable. I think that would be the only real way to do it right now. Someone may have a more efficient way though.
There are variations on this of course, like sending up a notice on screen if their Mac falls into a group that detects an issue, so its more "in their face", but it would be the same principal - If the Mac falls into said Smart Group, take some action to alert the logged in user of the issue via a standard policy.

Alternately, this is a manual process, but you could pull up the Smart Group and then use the Action button to send an email to all users assigned to Macs that are part of that group.
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But its not an automated process.

If the above was a kind of Feature Request, I would agree this would be a nice function to have. I have a feeling there may already be a feature request asking for this.

tkessler
New Contributor II

Thanks! It was both a question and then if not possible, a feature request. I like the option for admins being able to receive emails upon group changes, but would like some option to include end-user emails for group changes pertaining to assigned systems.

I think the policy-based approach would be a good option to implement as an alternative, though scripting it as an applescript alert or notification to appear on the end system with IT contact info might be more useful. Too bad we can't really implement images in applescript alerts, but I could use an icon file for this, or alternatively use another alerting system (ugh!).