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Populating Smart Groups with New Devices

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myu
Contributor

2 weeks ago

I've often read on posts (or heard on YouTube videos) the admonition that one really shouldn't have many PreStage Enrolments without really being told the reason why not. Here I am looking at 8 of them and I can see that apart from one (Staff Macbooks which require Jamf Connect Config Profiles in PreStage), there really isn't that much difference between Lab 1, Lab 2, etc PreStages so I could technically combine them to just Lab PreStage. However, I assign computers to each PreStage and use the PreStage "membership" to populate our Smart Groups (e.g. Lab 1 Smart Group has criteria of memberof Lab 1 PreStage).

 

If you are using a single PreStage for all your devices, how do you populate your Smart Groups? The only way I can see is if you make multiple criteria using "Serial Number equals XXXX" with the OR operator which I find more tedious than just checking them under the correct PreStage.

 

Keen to hear how others are doing it.

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AJPinto
Honored Contributor II

2 weeks ago

As you have learned generally you don't want a lot of Prestage Enrollments. Generally, your Prestage should be just for your most essential device configuration, and absolutely nothing else. Personally, I would not be using Prestage for a smart group criteria. For example, my environments get two.

  • One is for the engineering lab so we can adjust the Prestage for testing without worry of impacting production,
  • other is obviously production.

 

As far as smart groups, it's really up to you.

  • If your labs have IP ranges, you can set a smart group to drop a computer in to a specific group based on its network location. 
  • You can enable a popup menu extension attribute, which would add a dropdown list to the device record. Set the popup menu to have whatever you want like lab1 and lab2, then a smart group to pull devices based on what value that dropdown has set.
  • There are many other options, but these are the most basic.

 

In the end it is ultimately up to the needs of your environment. Best practice is just that, a best practice, if something works better to meet your needs then that is totally valid and what you should be doing.

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AJPinto
Honored Contributor II

2 weeks ago

As you have learned generally you don't want a lot of Prestage Enrollments. Generally, your Prestage should be just for your most essential device configuration, and absolutely nothing else. Personally, I would not be using Prestage for a smart group criteria. For example, my environments get two.

  • One is for the engineering lab so we can adjust the Prestage for testing without worry of impacting production,
  • other is obviously production.

 

As far as smart groups, it's really up to you.

  • If your labs have IP ranges, you can set a smart group to drop a computer in to a specific group based on its network location. 
  • You can enable a popup menu extension attribute, which would add a dropdown list to the device record. Set the popup menu to have whatever you want like lab1 and lab2, then a smart group to pull devices based on what value that dropdown has set.
  • There are many other options, but these are the most basic.

 

In the end it is ultimately up to the needs of your environment. Best practice is just that, a best practice, if something works better to meet your needs then that is totally valid and what you should be doing.

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myu
Contributor

a week ago

I figured as much ... thanks @AJPinto 

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