From the 10.39 release notes:

[PI109755] When a computer inventory submission hangs and "Collect available software updates" is selected in the Computer Inventory Collection settings, the computer successfully moves on from the failed command after a period of time.

@burdett To build on what @cbrewer posted, if you do a softwareupdate -l in Terminal on a Mac that's reporting that error does it complete as expected?

I have recently been seeing this on a few computers as well since 10.39.1

I used jamf remote to send softwareupdate -l.  It is taking a long time to finish.  It is running an older system 10.15.7

I haven't checked the last release but as far as I know this is still broken. I talk about this issue here - This Page Here 

I sincerely miss having Jamf being able to grab security, safari and app store updates automatically.

There are issues with software updates with later versions Big Sur ...We have to 

sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated

to get it working  : ) don't really know if it's Apple or our security software. : ) 

C

So far all the devices with this issue are 10.15.7.   a policy to run launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated on the devices and run an inventory have done so error free.  

You are awesome. Thanks so much for this. It's hitting and fixing our entire fleet now. (I was looking at lists and policies this morning and said out loud, "11.6.5 is not up-to-date!")

Unfortunately, this fox did not resolve this issue. But, thanks for the suggestion @gachowski  😀

That is brilliant, @gachowski 
Thank you so much

Count me in.

I can see this issue since Jamf 10.39.1 on various macOS versions (10.15.x, 11.x & 12.x) and kickstarting the softwareupdate daemon does NOT solve it.

Unfortunately. True. It did not resolve the issue. 

It did for a lot of machines for us but not all. This is clearly a pretty bad bug which they hopefully fix ASAP.

Add me to this.  macOS is 10.15.7, 11.x and maybe others now...truly annoying to say the least.

We are experiencing this as well. I have submitted a support ticket.

We are also seeing this issue across our estate. Its affecting multiple OS versions. Its not every device, and its not every inventory, but its happening frequently enough. However, previously policy's often failed to inventory when 'Collect software updates' was selected. The inventory would fail due to software update collection, but the error wasn't reported. Whats changed is better error reporting. I'd still like to know why its failing though, is it a Jamf of an Apple issue?

Random here too, and it's timing out on the "software update" bit.  Even though we have a decent amount of Extension Attributes, it's never done this before, so yeah, sumpin' is up.

I've run sudo jamf recon -verbose, but nothing other than that shows as the culprit here.

@deploy2020 

I have seen on machines not enrolled in Jamf a few times, so I assume it's a Apple issue... : ) 

Starting to see this on random computers in the enterprise, after updating to MacOS 12.4.  Is it just a matter of extending the time, if possible?

Locating hardware information (macOS 12.4.0)...
Software update timed out after 300 seconds.

I am not seeing this error at all anymore on our 800 Mac fleet as of around 7/18. I only saw it very rarely after running this on all of them:
launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated; sleep 10; softwareupdate -l; sleep 10; /usr/local/jamf/bin/jamf recon

Still seeing on ~10 Macs here...I hate it since I have email notifications setup for failed recons...

Created a script & Policy and pushed to those computers with recon errors.  It seemed to have worked.

launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated; sleep 10; softwareupdate -l; sleep 10; /usr/local/jamf/bin/jamf recon

@A-bomb - I'm not against trying this, but it makes me wonder what went wrong - Jamf or the Macs or?

Not wanting to change what's been working without understanding why it's happening.  But, thank you for that. Maybe I'll test one and see what happens...

@scottb It seems MacOS is between updates and it fails finding the correct version.  I am seeing this on 11.x macOS mostly.  Once they get the update or the script, it seems to resolve the recon issue.