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Jamf Protect Continuous High CPU Usage

Description

This article explains how to troubleshoot high CPU usage caused by Jamf Protect and collect information for further investigation. Ensure that the scenario you are facing falls into the problematic and unexpected CPU utilization category.

Normal and Expected CPU utilization:

Problematic and Unexpected CPU utilization:

  • The user is running a task that involves many file system changes in a small amount of time, such as:

  • Code compilation or Git project changes

  • Media encoding

  • CPU utilization spikes but returns to normal when the task is done.

  • The user is performing normal, day-to-day tasks that aren’t expected to involve high resource utilization.

  • Tasks that may have been short to complete on previous Jamf Protect versions now take far longer after a recent update.

  • CPU utilization spikes and does not return to normal.

  • Memory utilization spikes and does not return to normal.

  • The battery is drained unnecessarily.

Information to Collect for Technical Support

Collect the following from affected devices:

  • Jamf Protect version (check Jamf Pro Inventory record)

  • Number of affected devices - is this happening across the whole fleet or is it restricted to specific departments, for example developers?

  • macOS version of the affected device

  • Processor architecture: Apple Silicon or Intel

  • What was happening during/before the sustained spike was identified? For example: Was there a code build in progress? Ex: an XCode build of an app Was there any high resources process running? Ex: Docker builds?

  • Can the concurrents tasks that were running when the spike was identified be pinpointed?

  • Collect results of a sudo protectctl info -v from the affected machine ( can also be gathered from the Jamf Check Tool below)

Investigate Potential Jamf Protect Exceptions

  1. Use these tools to identify what exceptions to create:

  2. Create an exception in Jamf Protect from the identified File, process, or path. Test to see if CPU usage changes.

  3. Based on the findings, determine whether an exception for a specific file, process, or path is appropriate.

  4. If appropriate, create a narrowly scoped exception in Jamf Protect and repeat the affected task.

  5. Record whether CPU usage and task completion time improve.

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