Installing applications - best practices?

Greg_E

I need to get going on this again, I had most things set up but was having trouble installing some applications.

What I was doing was building a "large" number of installs into a policy and running that after joining the domain and name change and inventory. But some of the apps were erroring, didn't matter if I uploaded the installer or if it was winget. My theory is that the system needed a reboot, but previous policies should have taken care of that. Also getting in the way was the fact that if the first install failed, it would skip all the other items in that policy, even when I set it to continue. This was all on v1.5.8 but I don't think there were too many changes in 1.6.0 aside from some security/bug related changes.

So now I'm wondering if I should build a single policy for each application and set it to reboot after each install? or figure out where a balance point might be for reboots and set the reboot as a separate policy in the chain of events?

Having 20 reboots is not something I look forward to seeing, but it might be the only way.

Eruthon

Hi @Greg_E,

"large multi-module" policies shouldn't be a problem, although I rather create one policy per program (and yes, it took a lot of time). Can you share some logs from endpoints to see where is your policy crashing?

Greg_E

I pulled the entire system down a while ago for something else, it was all in a hypervisor for testing. I need to get back to this and figure it out.

Tarrantx

I've created one policy per application as well. Just easier to troubleshoot that way. Also I've just started using dynamic groups and they seem to work really well. If an install fails it will just keep trying until it succeeds. Plus, after a reimage the system will automatically end up in these dynamic groups and will receive the app installs when it is ready.

Greg_E

I had dynamic groups going to with testing. In production I have different applications in different classrooms, so the groups pulled out of my AD made the most sense.