Reusing Smart Groups or Cloning.

[gachowski]

So as we move to Big Sur, this is an opportunity to clean up our Jamf Pro. we have started moving to "natural language" really long and human-readable policy and smart groups names. The idea is that anyone could understand what is going on. And today that I had the idea to add the Policy ID number to the Smart group name.

So the question is do you re-use smart groups or clone and have one group for each policy? or a mix? pros and cons?

Thanks
C

[#2]

Feel like it would be cool if you could expand a Smart Group name (when you are viewing a list of macOS smart groups) and it would display all the policies or configuration profiles associated to that group. Kinda along the lines of your idea to put the JAMF policy ID in the name of the smart or static group name.

[sdagley]

@gachowski Definitely +1 on descriptive names, but I'd stop short of Policy ID number in a Smart Group name. That could potentially lead to a lot of redundant Smart Groups, and having lot of extra Smart Groups seems to be discouraged by Jamf Support and in their certification classes. Another thing to consider is if you ever use JamfMigrator to backup/restore the Policies and/or Smart Groups of your JSS, or migrate them to another JSS instance, you're not guaranteed to have the same ID number you started with.

@steven_ Having the display of any policies scoped to a Smart or Static Group built-in to the JSS GUI for on-demand display would be great, but building that report takes a while, so I'd rate it as a very unlikely FR to be implemented. There are several tools to analyze group usage, and the one I get the most use of is JamfProGroupsScoped so you might take a look at that if you're not familiar with it. Be aware it does not report on nested Smart Groups if you utilize any of those.

[mschroder]

We re-use many smart groups for various policies, so that already excludes adding the policy id to the name. In addition I don't believe adding the policy ID would make the name more 'telling'.

[gachowski]

I kind agree and didn't move forward with Policy ID in smart groups, but today I almost added the Policy ID to a script name, but I think it might just over complicate the name?

[mschroder]

Isn't it sufficient if the policy name and the script name are telling enough? But I admit it's not always easy to find telling names. I have a group of policies where I'm still unhappy about the names since they are too close to each other, and I never know which does what. So point taken, I will rename them now. But no policy IDs in script names for me.

[AdamCraig]

I recently did a large cleanup of jamf policies. and that really made me re-examine some of my naming. +1 for descriptive names.

Also I copied and pasted all of my policies into a spreadsheet, added a column for "category" and that allowed me to really re-think the categories and drag and drop them around to different places. and make notes on what needed re-named without getting derailed by clicking into policies to examine them. It also really made me notice the ones where I read the names and was like "What does that do..."

[tsylwest]

Would be cool if policies and possibly other components of Jamf Pro, like Smart and Static groups, had a description field that would show up if you hovered over a policy or group in the list view,