Getting Application Usage Data at Scale With Munki Munki is a series of tools and a popular application state management tool many Mac Admins across the globe use. Some out-of-box features of Munki solve problems many commercial MDMs still cannot solve to this day. It allows a Mac Admin to write some declarative data and have Munki takes care of the rest for you. We use it to manage and patch all of our third party apps in conjunction with AutoPKG.

Programmatically Apply FleetDM Labels from Identity Data For a long time now it has been considered a “bad practice,” to join a macOS computer to any sort of directory service. Long have past the days of Binding to Active Directory, and the ancient lore of the golden (or magic) triangle is nearly lost in time, like tears in the rain. The one thing that we could consider missing from these days was the ability to locally query user and identity data through native tools like dscl in macOS.

Success Isn’t Linear, Nor is it Transitive With the climate of tech workers in a weird state post Covid-19 pandemic, and with the rise of the tech influencer I feel this topic is not only relevant, but also important. There are people who really want to break into a tech career from their current path, and there are people who want to change careers within tech itself. Whether you are looking to level up your existing career, make a move into a different section of tech, or just trying to break into the tech industry any way you can, you have likely heard many other people tell their success stories.

I started working in tech back in 1999. My first tech job was a repair technician at a computer store chain. I did hardware and software repairs, warranty repairs, OEM systems building, and similar support type work. Over the years I’ve likely had a similar experience to most other workers in tech. I have had bad bosses, and good bosses. I also have worked with great people, and not-so-great people as well.

IT Teams are also Security Teams If you have worked in some tech related job odds are you have also worked with various security teams throughout your career. There has definitely been a divide between IT teams and Security teams I have observed in my near 25 years working in tech, but that doesn’t have to be the case. During my career I have definitely observed security “punting labor” over the fence to IT teams, and I have seen IT teams dig their feet into the ground when security wants to change things.

Data Modeling osquery Data in Snowflake We have been working on many projects the past few months, and osquery data pipelines with the help of FleetDM has been one of our constant works in progress. Before I dive into the data modeling part, I wanted to share how we scaled this data out. We ended up going forward with FleetDM’s SaaS offering over self-hosting the app. However, we are still streaming query results from FleetDM cloud to Snowflake over AWS Kinesis Firehose and we now have data streaming from FleetDM into Snowflake at a very fast rate and high volume.