Smart Groups?

[ianmb]

Out of interest, what Smart Groups have you set up in your JSS? Anything interesting that's away from the norm?

Also, how would I go about setting up something to monitor the SMART status of a hard disk?

[rderewianko]

We have smart groups that notify us if a machine hasn't checked in 30 days.
Show battery issues (eg health is not healthy, more than 980 cycles)
Smart: Is not Verified, is Not supported
Scoped to our vms, which we use a different way to deploy.

[adamcodega]

I use smart groups first for departmental organization of computers. Rather than moving a computer into a static group I have a smart group based on the department setting of the computer.

I also use smart groups to show me computers that have been newly enrolled in the past 48 or 72 hours. This makes it easy to find newly deployed computers and make sure they get their department set. (Until I automate this during computer deployment)

What's really fun to do, especially for your S.M.A.R.T. status question, is to use extensions to run a command and base membership off of the result of the command. I was about to make an extension for the command:

diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART

Which would return you the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive, but as it turns out this is readily available from the smart group settings in JSS. Under criteria, when you add a criteria scroll to the bottom of the list and click Show for All Criteria.You'll see a large list of readily available criteria, some may spark your creativity or solve an issue, and S.M.A.R.T. status is one of them. Results will either be verified if a drive is fine or Not Supported if something is wrong.

What's great about smart groups is you can receive an email when membership changes, meaning, yeah you can look at your inventory and quickly see who has drive space over 80% use, but that's a manual step. Now you can receive an email (preferably to your ticketing system) when someone's drive starts to become full and then reach out to them and see what remedy they need.

[thuluyang]

We have several groups that you might be interested:
1 Filevault_not_enabled
2 Fireware_not_enabled
3 OsX Update Required
4 FlashVersion_lower_14.0
5 EFI_password_enabled
6 Sophos_not_installed
7 Not_checkin_over_15days
8 Newly_enrolled_within_7days
9Harddisk_not_SSD
Most of them are security related.

[thuluyang]

Lost one:
P2P_software

[dpertschi]

I use smart groups for reporting purposes. I have to report patch penetration to our security dept. every two weeks.

Yes, I could use the Inventory Search, but since I seem to spend a lot of time in Smart Groups anyway, it's convenient to create a SG which shows how many machines have a given piece of software installed, then divide the by the number of eligible machines.

For example, I've got two SG's that report from extension attribute data.

P - Flash is not 14.0.0.176
R - Flash is 14.0.0.176 < 30

P indicates use in a Policy, R indicates use only for reporting.
< 30 indicates last contact within 30 days (my reporting threshhold)

Then I have other SG's that total number of eligible machines, in this case

All clients < 30 days

So if All clients < 30 days equals 1041 and R - Flash is 14.0.0.176 < 30 equals 857, then my total penetration is 82%.