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macOS Deserves Better Telemetry

5 min read

The Digital Employee Experience market is booming. Analysts love it. Enterprise vendors are racing to build platforms that monitor every click, every app launch, every ticket deflection across your fleet.

But if you manage Macs, you’ve probably noticed something: most of these platforms were built for Windows.

macOS support gets added as a checkbox feature—enough to survive a procurement review, not enough to actually be useful. The agent is heavier than it needs to be. The data model doesn’t map cleanly to how macOS works. Half the features don’t apply. And the price tag assumes macOS is an afterthought in a Windows-heavy fleet—whether you have 200 Macs or 20,000.

So most Mac teams end up in one of three places:

1. “We bought a DEX platform, but we only really use it for Windows.”

You’re paying enterprise licensing for a platform that gives you deep Windows telemetry and surface-level Mac data. The macOS agent exists, but it drains battery, the metrics are sparse, and your Mac admins still end up SSH’ing into machines to figure out what’s actually going on.

2. “We wrote some scripts.”

A shell script that collects top output, maybe some powermetrics data, kicked off by a launch daemon or an MDM policy on a schedule. It works—until it doesn’t. A macOS update changes something under the hood, the script breaks silently, and nobody notices for three months. You’ve built a monitoring tool without the resources to maintain one.

3. “We just don’t monitor Macs.”

Windows gets full observability. Macs get nothing. They’re “the creative team’s machines”—until a VP’s MacBook is thermal throttling during a board presentation and suddenly endpoint visibility is everyone’s problem.

The gap

The DEX market is solving real problems, but it’s solving them with a Windows-first lens. Whether you’re a 200-device startup that’s all-Mac or a 20,000-seat enterprise with a growing macOS footprint, the options look the same:

  • Pay for a platform built for someone else’s fleet
  • Cobble together scripts and hope they hold
  • Go without

None of these are good.

What we wanted

We didn’t need another platform that tries to do everything. And we definitely didn’t need another console.

You already pay for Splunk. Your security data lives there. Your infrastructure data lives there. Your alerting, your dashboards—they all run through Splunk. So why would you ship your Mac endpoint telemetry to yet another vendor’s portal that your team has to learn, maintain, and context-switch into? The data should go where your team already works.

And if you’re not ready to connect Splunk on day one, Pulse Endpoint includes a built-in dashboard—so you can see your data the moment you install it.

We needed something much simpler:

The kind of granular, real-time performance data that Windows admins have had with PerfMon for decades—but for macOS. Data collected at a level of detail you need to actually diagnose problems, not just detect them. Collected efficiently. Delivered to Splunk. Deployed via MDM. No infrastructure to run. No platform to manage.

That’s what we built.

Pulse Endpoint

Pulse Endpoint is a lightweight, native macOS agent built in Swift. It collects performance and health data and ships it directly to your Splunk instance as structured JSONL—no middleware, no parsing, no servers in between.

  • Native and lightweight — Built for macOS from the ground up. Minimal CPU and battery impact because it’s not a cross-platform agent shoehorned onto a Mac.
  • Splunk-native — Your data lands in Splunk ready to query. No universal forwarder required, no field extraction headaches.
  • MDM-ready — Deploy and configure entirely through configuration profiles. Push it to your fleet the same way you push everything else.
  • Useful data, not all the data — Focused on the metrics Mac admins actually need, not a firehose designed to justify a platform license.

Who this is for

Whether you manage 50 Macs or 50,000, if you’ve wished you had the same endpoint visibility that your Windows team takes for granted—without the overhead of a platform that treats macOS as an afterthought—Pulse Endpoint is what we built for you.

We’re currently in beta. Sign up and try Pulse Endpoint.