Providing Jamf Pro computer inventory information via macOS configuration profile

Jamf Pro can store and make available a lot of information about a particular computer and who is using it as part of the computer’s inventory record, but it can be challenging to access that information from the computer itself.

It is possible to use an API call to access this information, using either the Jamf Pro API or Jamf Pro’s Classic API, but that means providing a way to authenticate to the API. This may pose some security issues as you will need to both:

• Provide a way for the computer to access those authentication credentials
• Protect the authentication credentials from potentially malicious third parties

Fortunately, there is an alternative way to provide at least some inventory information without needing to make an API call. Jamf Pro provides a number of variables which can be used in macOS configuration profiles and it’s possible to leverage those variables to build a profile whose task is providing information from the computer’s inventory record in Jamf Pro in a way which can be accessed from the managed computer. For more details, please see below the jump.

The variables which are available to macOS configuration profiles as of Jamf Pro 10.44.0 are listed in the table shown below:

I’ve used them to build a profile which will pull the information associated with the variables below:

When deployed, the profile will pull the relevant information from the computer record in Jamf Pro and store it as part of the profile.

This information in turn can be read from a plist file which should appear in the /Library/Managed Preferences directory on the managed Macs which the profile is being deployed to. In this case, the profile is managing the com.company.information domain, which means that a file named com.company.information.plist should appear in /Library/Preferences.

This information can then be read out of the /Library/Preferences/com.company.information.plist file by either the defaults command or an alternate tool which can parse a plist file for information.

The example profile I’ve written is available below: