How do deferrals work with Jamf Pro Software Updates?

wrinks
New Contributor II

Hi all,

I'm planning to use Software Updates in Jamf Pro for our MacOS users. I see there's an option to download the updates but defer installation and the ability to enter an integer for number of deferrals. How are these deferrals measured? Is there a default amount of time between each attempt? I've tried looking through documentation and the forums but haven't found clarity on this.

3 REPLIES 3

jamf-42
Valued Contributor II

historically deferrals have been hit and miss.. mostly miss.. stopped using.. now using scheduled / DDM

Maybe deferral has improved.. but I'd rather have update by this time and know it works..

more info here:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10041/

McAwesome
Valued Contributor

Going off memory but I believe it's incremented when the user interacts with the notification, not when the notification is shown.  So if the user never taps on it, then technically no deferral has been used.  After they interact with it, the count goes up one and the next try happens roughly a day later.

belacwesd
New Contributor II

I have also looked for information and have not found it. So I will tell you based off of what i have noticed and been informed by our Users.

When I was trying to get our environment to Sonoma, I was pushing the update via Software Updates with 3 deferrals. I did this once a day for a week, due to conflicting reports as to the ability for JAMF to actually work with this feature. I was pushing out the same update with 3 deferrals to all computers 1 time a day around the time when most of our users were on.  The results: What i was told by 1 end user was they had been deferring the update for the whole work week. So my best guess is that everytime i sent out the command it reset the deferral count. But that has been my experience and it has not been the whole agency but the few computers that were actually getting this update action. Aside from that the end user was telling me that i only ever prompted them to update at the beginning of the day when they first opened the computer. I am not sure if they were turning the computer off at the end of the day or simply shutting it closed. 

I cant wait until our whole agency is on MacOS 14 to use the DDM as that is built into the OS.