How are you managing software reporting for MacOS?

Posted by RikiWardOG@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 6 comments

We are currently testing some 3rd party patch solutions. One of our biggest issues is none of them do a good job at being able to report on all newly installed software because it always includes all our baseline apps and all their updates. I would love to find a solution that allows us to essentially say give us a report of all apps that match this criteria or don't match this criteria. Essentially being able to automate away the manual process of removing our baseline apps from the report that everyone at the company will have. Maybe I'm expecting too much from such a tool and need to be looking at a different product other than a 3rd party patching tool?

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6 Comments

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logoth@reddit

What are you using to manage your Macs otherwise? Some solutions have reporting or scripting, and if you can run commands, you could automate it with scripts and system profiler.

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RikiWardOG@reddit (OP)

Using jamf... I'm thinking of pivoting to look at custom reporting via powerbi

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logoth@reddit

Jamf Pro? There's a ton of Jamf community content for various cases, someone may have done what you're looking for already.

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flawzies@reddit

Could be done with a bunch of solutions but it depends on the criteria you're after and what solutions you already have in place. Azure storage, and so on. I would primarily make a bash script to collect the info.

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SkiingAway@reddit

If you have a report in a normal format and you have a list of stuff you don't want in it.....writing a script to remove that stuff is pretty easy?

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RikiWardOG@reddit (OP)

yeah I legit just had a convo with my manager about this. I basically said exactly that. Take the csv run it against a script to pull out anything we don't want and give us back only what we're looking for. Just frustrating that nothing we've looked at has it baked in. Like something more advanced which would be ideal would be software install alerts but only for software that hasn't been OK'd by IT. Which starts to ask the question of if really we should be looking more at some sort of CASB/SIEM solution for this aspect.