You use Profile Manager to configure and distribute settings to Apple devices in your organization. You can use Profile Manager to quickly configure large numbers of devices with the settings, apps, and books your organization requires.
Jun 03, 2019 Significant Changes in macOS 10.15 Catalina of Interest to Mac Admins. MacOS is now on a separate partition that is read-only. This is similar to how iOS works. In the beta, you’ll see.
Profile Manager creates and distributes a configuration profile. You install them on a device to configure the settings. To learn more about configuration profiles, see Payload settings reference. When the profile is installed on a user’s device, the settings it defines are applied. If the settings are applied to a user, those settings apply to any device associated with that user. If the settings are applied to a device, those settings are enforced regardless of who uses the device.
Each user, user group, device, and device group can have configuration profiles to provide a base level of settings. Then you can assign additional configuration profiles to customize the settings to meet your needs.
In addition to general configuration settings, Profile Manager lets you enforce organization policies. For example, you can specify password policies, define the types of networks devices can connect to, and enforce restrictions such as preventing the use of cameras and disabling specific system preferences in macOS. If you’re managing the devices remotely, you can install updated policies without user action or notification.
After you define the settings for users and their devices, you can distribute the configuration profiles in the following ways:
Distributed upon activation: Settings can be automatically configured after the device has been activated over the Internet.
Remote device management: You can enable the Profile Manager mobile device management service, which lets you remotely install, remove, and update configuration profiles on enrolled devices.
User self-service: Users can download and install the settings from the Profile Manager built-in user portal. The user portal ensures that users receive the configuration profiles you assign to them or their group.
Manual distribution: You can download configuration profiles (.mobileconfig files) from the Profile Manager administration portal and then send them to your users via a mail message or post them to a website you create. When users receive or download the files, they can install them on their device.
You can remotely lock devices that you manage using Profile Manager. On a Mac, locking shuts down the Mac and installs an EFI passcode to prevent it from starting up without providing the passcode. On iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, locking invokes the Lock screen and enforces the passcode, if any, installed on the device.
Wiping a Mac removes all user data. Wiping an iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch restores it to factory defaults.
For iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, you can also reset a user’s passcode when the user forgets it. During this process, the device passcode is removed temporarily (for 60 minutes). To unlock the device, the user is immediately required to enter a new passcode that meets the criteria specified by the configuration profiles installed on the device.
Profile Manager consists of three main parts that work together to let you specify when and how devices are enrolled and configured, and apps and books are distributed.
Mobile device management (MDM) service: A mobile device management service lets you remotely manage enrolled devices. After a device is enrolled, you can update a configuration over the network and perform other tasks without user interaction. MDM is supported on:
iPhone and iPod touch (iOS 5 or later)
iPad (iOS 5 or later or iPadOS 13.1 or later)
Apple TV (tvOS 9 or later)
Mac computers (OS X 10.7 or later)
Wireless configuration of Apple devices: This lets you streamline the configuration of organization-owned devices. To get users up and running quickly, enroll devices in MDM during activation and skip basic setup steps.
App and book distribution: Distribute apps and books purchased through Apple School Manager or Apple Business Manager and custom apps and books.
To find out more about setting up Profile Manager, see About Profile Manager in the macOS Server User Guide.
For more information about mobile device management settings, see Mobile Device Management Settings for IT Administrators.
For more information about deploying large numbers of iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV see the Deployment Reference for iPhone and iPad.
For more information about deploying large numbers of Mac computers and Apple TV, see the Deployment Reference for Mac.
Profile Manager's basic set-up is in Server app. You must use Safari to access Profile Manager's /mydevices web page and the administration web page.
Only server administrators can access your administration page. The URL format for your administration page is:
To enrol an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or a Mac, go to:
If you can't access the administration page with a web browser other than Safari, try with Safari. If you can't access it with Safari, try the following troubleshooting steps.
DNS settings are important when you're managing a Profile Manager deployment. If Profile Manager doesn't open, make sure that your server points to a reliable DNS server.
If you are experiencing issues when pushing profiles or apps to client systems, check the system log file in Console. If it reports that your server can't reach Apple's APNs servers, check your network's configuration. Make sure that all needed ports are open.
For more information, turn on APNS debug logging with these Terminal commands:
You can find the log file at /Library/Logs/apsd.log.
After your APNS transactions have been logged, use these Terminal commands to turn off debug logging:
Profile Manager logs can help you fix issues with Profile Manager. You can find a symbolic link named 'devicemgr' at /var/log. This file points to /Library/Logs/ProfileManager, where you can find these logs:
devicemgrd.log |
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dm_helper.log |
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dmrunnerd.log |
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migration_tool.log |
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php.log |
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php-fpm.log |
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php-fpm.devicemgr.log |
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PostgreSQL-<yyyy-mm-dd>.log |
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profilemanager.log |
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servermgr_devicemgr.log |
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These logs can also provide helpful information:
In macOS Sierra and later, some information is stored via Unified logging. The following terminal command can provide you with some additional helpful information:
Some of these logs might list transaction 'failures' or retries. Most of these entries are expected and don't indicate an issue. These logged events are conflicts between attempts to modify the underlying PostgreSQL database at the same time. These kinds of failures retry until they succeed.
You can identify transaction conflicts when you see any of these notes in your log files:
More information on how to fix an issue is sometimes available if you increase the log level. To gather the information that you need, reproduce the issue after you have increased the logging level.
When you've finished, revert to the original logging level. If you leave the logging level at a higher setting, it decreases the available space on your start-up drive.
To increase the level of logging, use this Terminal command:
This automatically restarts Profile Manager Service.
To revert the logging level back to its original setting, use this Terminal command:
This automatically restarts Profile Manager Service.