Smart Groups not updating automatically after upgrade to v9

[yan1212]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone can shed some light on this?

After upgrading our JSS to v9.21 from v8.73 I am seeing smart groups not updating automatically. I seem to have to either open the group up for editing and save again (even if no changes are made) or have the client(s) submit inventory for the Smart Group to pick up the changes and adjust membership accordingly.

This is particularly a problem where I have Smart Groups created based on extension attributes using pop-up menu options. The pop-up menu extension attributes that were migrated from v8.73 were effectively rendered useless and I had to re-write all of them. They now work but with the problem I am mentioning above.

I saw that other people have been having problems with Smart Group updating in other threads but there is no definitive solution that I could find. I am hoping that maybe someone has come across this sort of thing before and managed to solve it??

Thanks

[mm2270]

This is interesting information, and one we'll need to keep our eye on when we do our upgrade to Casper Suite 9 very soon.
Does JAMF have any ideas on why a single bad piece of criteria from an EA is causing ALL Smart Groups to stop updating automatically? I'm guessing that this isn't really expected behavior?

[golbiga]

@amanda.wulff you are correct. There were two EA's that were causing two Smart Groups to fail. Once we updated those EAs everything just seemed to work. I still want to do one more migration test, so I will update more after that is complete.

[were_wulff]

@mm2270

This one is new information to us as well! At the moment, we're not sure why it's happening.

I did find a very, very, very old defect from the 7 series (that has long since been closed out!) that exhibited the same behavior, and after a bit of digging I found that we have a recently re-opened D-005435 that describes the situation of bad Smart Group criteria causing groups to fail to recalculate.

It's certainly not expected behavior; what I'd expect, if bad criteria or a bad EA were involved, is that we'd see that particular group or set of groups using it fail to update or cause errors. I certainly wouldn't expect to see it cause all Smart Groups to exhibit this behavior.

I suspect nobody else would expect to see that either.

I'd also like to thank everyone in this thread that was testing it out and posting their results, as it significantly sped things up in terms of getting this narrowed down!

For those of you that had open cases, I'm going to pay them a visit to attach them to D-005435. I'll also leave notes on D-005435 linking to this thread in case any additional information is needed.

Thanks again for all your patience, and for helping out in getting this narrowed down!

Amanda Wulff
JAMF Software Support

[dpertschi]

On JSS 8.73, I see inaccurate count's on some of my SG's. @pearlins report of this occurring in ALL of his v9 SG worries me greatly, as we're close to a JSS upgrade. This is critical functionality, but I'm inclined to believe it's correct on the back end, and only inaccurate within the web GUI.

So I've gotten into the habit of using SG's for reporting purposes. It's real convenient to look at two SG numbers (machines that need xyz, machines that have xyz) and calculate the % deployed.

I just opened and saved about 75 of my 100 SG's and found that all of those whose numbers changed by more than one or two, are using this criteria: Last Contact / less than x days ago / 30

[pearlin]

Just to alleviate some apprehension for those of you planing imminent v9 upgrades, we were running v9 without incident for about 6 months until this issue struck. Our case had to do with a once acceptable criteria being deprecated, probably in the 9.4 release (for us, it was "Boot Drive Percentage Full" which was set to "Yes" but apparently was changed to only accept numerical values). This invalid criteria prevented all Smart Groups from calculated, which clearly isn't a desired behavior. So, I don't suspect this to be a v9 issue as much as it is an underlying Smart Group issue having to do with how they react to invalid criteria (ie freaking out instead of skipping).

[were_wulff]

Hey all,

After having a few conversations with QA, Development, and my Team Lead, we determined that the behavior being seen here is different enough to warrant its own defect.

So, I've opened up D-007887 and moved your cases onto that one.

We're also looking into whether or not that behavior may be related to a specific issue we have open (D-007079) in which Smart Groups stop recalculating on upgrades from 8 to 9. Considering that a couple people here, in their testing, did find bad criteria in a Smart Group, and removing/fixing that criteria seemed to make the behavior stop, it's very possible that the two are closely related.

For newcomers to this thread, if you don't already have a case open with your Technical Account Manager, please get in contact with them ASAP to get a case going; the more information we have on this behavior, the more it helps us determine exactly what's going wrong and how we can get it fixed.
Those of you that already have open cases with your TAM, if you find any new information in your environment, please update them so we can get that noted.

You can get in touch with your TAM either by sending an e-mail to support@jamfsoftware.com (it will go directly to their case queue), by giving us a call, or by using the My Support section of JAMF Nation.

Thanks!
Amanda Wulff
JAMF Software Support

[golbiga]

I just did another migration test (8.73 -> 9.6) and this time made sure those 2 smart groups/EAs were configured properly. All Smart Groups are now updating as I would expect them to. For anyone who is running into this issue, test all of your Smart Groups and make sure that none of them error out. If one of them throws an error, then all of them will stop working.

[were_wulff]

@golbiga

Thanks so much for that update! That was what I was suspecting might happen, and why I do think those two defects are related.

I'll add this as a comment to both of them.

Amanda Wulff
JAMF Software Support

[wyip]

I just upgraded from 9.31 to 9.52 and was seeing the same issue with Smart Groups not updating. I could go in and Edit/Save to force a Smart Group to update, but I would have to do that each time.

I just found this thread, and decided to check my EAs. I noticed a few Data Types set incorrectly (integer instead of string), which I fixed, and sure enough my Smart Groups started updating again.

Thanks everyone in this thread who worked on this!

[were_wulff]

@wyip

Thanks for that update! I see you have an open case with your Technical Account Manager. I went ahead and got that attached to D-007887 and left a note letting him know what you'd found, as well as a link to to this thread.

Amanda Wulff
JAMF Software Support

[yellow]

To chime in.. I just finished updating from 8.73 -> 9.3.2 -> 9.6 and none of our Smart Groups are updating as well. I'll see if I can follow the process laid down in this thread.

Edit: I had 1 EA that was returning an integer. Changed it to string and will test a little.

[jlong]

We had this same issue in our environment. It started sometime after upgrading from 9.4 to 9.52, and persisted after upgrading to 9.6. It also persisted after removing all extension attributes.

A thorough audit revealed a few poorly configured smart groups, but correcting or removing these didn't fix anything either. It was only after going through and deleting almost every inactive policy that smart groups started updating normally after an inventory check. Unfortunately this wasn't done in a way to pinpoint the exact policy, but it's another thing to try for people experiencing this issue.

[BenDenham]

FIXED

First of all thanks to the people in this post! It would have been nice to have been pointed here before the upgrade when i asked our jamf support manager if there was anything else i need worry about before upgrading.. but hey i should have done more research.

I had the same issue after upgrading the day before yesterday from versions 8.72 to 9.6. I managed to fix the updating of the groups thanks to this post. All is now flowing smoothly and i am happy about this.

Smart groups would not update what so ever. Even the smart groups i had made "JSS binaries updated" and "JSS binaries not yet updated" based on binary criteria would not update. Started to get very annoyed about this after maybe 3 minutes.

I had originally planned on doing a migration to a newly built server by deploying the quickadd.pkg from the new server which i had previously provisioned and set up all smart groups, extension attributes and policies for our environment. Unfortunately we have a BYOD system and rely on location information for smartgroups so this was not possible.

Anyway when i compared the EA's on the upgraded JSS to the preivously built test JSS i had there was an issue where a couple of values were set as integer instead of string. I corrected this but it did not initially fix the issue.

Since i had pretty much all of the EA's i needed working correctly in the test JSS that i could not migrate to i decided to delete all of the EA's on the broken JSS. I then downloaded the EA.xml files from the test JSS and uploaded them to the broken JSS, so replacing each one.

I deleted any smart groups that were based on extension attributes criteria. I deleted a load of smart groups based on versions of software i didn't need also. I probably deleted more smart groups than i needed to since i knew i could just recreate them anyway.

Once i was satisfied I ran an inventory update on the scope "All Computers" and switched off the screen and moved back to my Windows side of things and focused on SCCM 2012 for a while, which was strange since it's normally is a lot more stressful than Casper.

So after the inventory update completed on all machines i recreated a load of smart groups. Re-advertised a load of policies which now had no scope defined and created some test policies and based some test groups on package receipt criteria. All seems good. I have also enrolled a few more macbooks and all smart groups are updating accordingly.

Thanks to everyone who posted their issues and how/if they went about fixing it.

Ben

[emily]

I've been on 9.52 for a while now, but am just now seeing that a handful of smart groups in our environment are not updating. Which makes me a sad panda. I'm hesitant to jump to 9.61 just yet, but I clearly need to test some things out to see why the smart groups are having issues.

[mks007]

We have also started to see this and it is now stopping us rolling out Yosemite due to the config profiles not being push out unless we use 9.5 or higher

my findings so far
9.24 SG Working
9.24 > 9.25 SG Working
9.25 > 9.3 SG Working
9.3 > 9.31 SG Working
9.31 > 9.32 SG Working
9.3 > 9.4 SG Working
9.4 > 9.5 SG NOT Working

We have a ticket open with support to try and find the rouge smart group.

[chuck3000]

Sorry for the duplicate post, but I also just found this thread.

I posted the following in https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=12446

I'm working with JAMF as in 9.61, apparently there's a "Defect" (I call them bugs), where the smart group doesn't properly update. You simply edit the smart group, make no changes and just save, then click Done.
Voila! The smart group updates. Unfortunately, every time your policy relies on a smart group, you have to go onto the smart group scoped to that policy and edit/save it. Pretty annoying and I hope they fix it soon!

[BenDenham]

@chuck3000

Managed to fix issues after reading through this thread and searching our JSS and deleting dodgy extension attrributes, and smart groups based on those. Seems like one rogue group/ EA can cause issues with the rest.

[andrew]

@chuck3000

I second @BenDenham. To play it safe, I ended up deleting, analyzing, and recreating all of my EA's prior to upgrading to 9.61. So far my Smart Groups are still smart.

If you want to verify operation, try making some dummy receipts/smartgroups like I outlined 3 weeks ago in this same thread.

[mks007]

Just found the 5 rough EA an corrected them, re started TomCat and the smart groups are now working on 9.61.

All this time wasted looking for rough smart groups :-( thanks @BenDenham for the tip on EA i would never of found this looking in our smart groups.

[cdenesha]

Clarification question: are all SGs broken in these situations, or just SGs that are dependent on the 'bad' groups?

If the former - why?

[mks007]

All SG fail you have to manually and update, this is a bug that seems to be in 9.5 and above

(D-007887) with description 'Bad Criteria in One Smart Group Causes ALL Smart Groups to Not Automatically Update’

[mapurcel]

We're on 9.61 and for us the problem was indeed one bad SG (invalid criteria). Once I removed that SG all of my SG's started updating.

[gachowski]

Me too, after I deleted all my old EA's and SG's the smart groups started working again : )

C

[dgreening]

We just ran into this issue after we upgraded from 9.32 to 9.61. We were able to determine that it was one smart group which had "bad criteria" and was causing the rest of our smart groups to not update. Here are the details in hopes that this can help some of you solve this.

Smart Group - Sophos Not 9.1.7
Criteria - (Application Title has Sophos and Sophos Version is not 9.1.7)

Sophos Version is an Extension Attribute fed by this script:

#!/bin/sh
SophosVers=$( defaults read /Library/Sophos Anti-Virus/product-info ProductVersion )
echo '<result>'$SophosVers'</result>'

What it looks like is that when you bracket in the Application Title with an Extension Attribute it causes it to fail. When I generate a saved search with the same it produced a "page could not be found" error, that same as viewing the broken Smart Group's membership. When I run the same search with each criteria bracketed on its own, or without brackets, it works fine.

[musat]

Ok, so if one bad smart groups can cause the problem, is an easy way to figure out which smart group of EA is causing the problem.

I can manually go through the smart groups, but how would I know that one had "bad criteria"? Since I think they all used to have "good criteria".

Tim

[musat]

Well, I think I found my "bad criteria" by trial and error. Just wishing there was a better way to figure out which group was bad.

[jrippy]

I just came across this thread as I was running into a similar issue on my server. I have yet to find the "bad" smart group and fix it, but I noticed this on my Licensed Software entries (which are essentially smart groups). We are on 9.65 and still having this issue so just wanted to let everyone know to also look at any Licensed software if you have that set up.