Installomator Smart Group issue

[dletkeman]

I attended JNUC in both 2023 and 2024 and finally have got around to implementing Installomator as per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2J6fTQXIwU.  Lots of people were talking about it and in 2024 was convinced to at least try it.  The implmentation in the video uses two Smart groups.

1. Smart group targetting "Patch Reporting" for the targetted application.  For example, the criteria would be Patch Reporting: Google Chrome is less than Latest Version.
2. Smart group targetting the above group because you can't target policies using Patch Reporting directly as per the video.

The first group using Patch Reporting updates just fine.  My issue is the 2nd group does not update correctly.  When I initially save it the numbers match but after testing by updating an app the 2nd group will not update to reflect the number of the 1st group.  The only way to update it is to go in and edit and resave the group.  Then it will update correctly until the next time it doesn't.

I contacted Jamf Support about this and they said it's a long standing PI.  I don't think he said the number.

Has anyone had this issue when implementing Installomator for patching?  Based on this I may just decide not to use it for patch updates, but then that kind of defeats the purpose of using Installomator for time savings.

Maybe there's a workaround that I hadn't considered.  Thought I would put it out there to see what the experience has been.

[Shyamsundar · Accepted solution]

I have created a smart group below, i have used Chrome as Example

1.) Chrome app on latest

Name: Chrome App on the latest

Criteria: Patch Reporting Chrome is Latest 

2 .) Chrome Not on Latest 

Name: Chrome App not on the latest

Criteria: Computer Group is not a member of Chrome App on the latest (Smart group from 1)

The application Title is Google Chrome. app, 

In this way, you will have the devices which are not the latest and also only have the devices in which chrome is installed. 

it shows the correct number for me.

[dletkeman]

That's a good alternative to try.  I'll check it out and see how it goes.

[dletkeman]

On further reflection this would only work for applications that are targetting all computers.  The first smart group that targets the Patch Reporting Criteria I'm not having an issue with.  But when you target the 2nd group as not a part of group 1 then you also target comptuers that may not have the app installed.  This is not my intention.

[dletkeman]

I won't have time to really dig into this but at the moment it seems to be the correct solution.

[Shyamsundar]

My second group has two Criteria, Which show only the device which installed with Chrome and not the latest. 

Criteria 1: Computer Group is not a member of Chrome App on the latest (Smart group from 1). AND 

Criteria 2:  The application Title is Google Chrome. app, 

[dletkeman]

Sorry I missed the Title criteria.  I should have caught that myself.  Wasn't thinking properly yesterday it seems.  I'm going to try this out.  Thank you.

[Jason33]

I use Installomator to initially deploy Chrome, then I use Jamf App Catalog to automatically deploy updates, scoped to a Smart Group with the criteria 'Application Title' is 'Google Chrome.app'. Works well for us and we typically have around 80% updated within a day of notification.

[dletkeman]

Yes.  I do something like this for some apps already.  Jamf Apps currently don't cover as many apps as Installomator has so I can't use that workflow for all apps.

[SMR1]

When we first started rolling out application updates, we had 2 smart groups for each application. The first was using Patch Reporting Title, Less Than, Latest Version. Then we had a second one that had the first group in it and then we would add our test groups, because we have to test with 3 test groups before rolling out to prod. In our policies, we used installomator. We had to change it, because we couldn't have different versions installing in Prod that weren't tested in the test groups. Now we just use one smart group for each app and have to select the version we're deploying that month.

[SMR1]

https://scriptingosx.com/2020/06/using-installomator-with-jamf-pro/

[dletkeman]

Great link.  I love it.