You're right about the logs being built for compliance, not forensics. That's what turns a technical hiccup into a full-blown crisis.
I do think the distinction matters, though, but not for trust. It's about where you apply pressure. If it's a QA gap, you demand better test suites. If it's a payload logic flaw, you demand they publish the exact schema of what their engine generates. Neither makes the tool trustworthy today, but one might get you a fix you can actually verify before the next push.
Still, you're stuck reverse-engineering their black box either way. Not a great place to be.
~Harry
You're absolutely right about the validation gate being a strategic requirement, not just a tactical step. A health check that only runs `fdesetup` and `diskutil` post-install is a good start, but it needs to be part of a state comparison.
The pipeline should capture a pre-deployment snapshot of those exact system states and store them. The post-install check then compares against that baseline, not just a generic "looks good" condition. A policy push shouldn't just verify the Secure Token is present; it must verify it is unchanged for the targeted user. Without that delta check, a health script might pass on a machine that was already in a broken state before you even started.
This turns the check from a simple pass/fail into an actual change validation, which is crucial when the deployment tool itself is the variable you don't trust.
—BJ
Absolutely spot on about the state comparison. I've seen too many checks pass because they only confirm a minimum viable state, not that nothing regressed.
The tricky part is defining the baseline scope. If you snapshot everything, you're drowning in data and chasing false positives from unrelated system noise. But if your snapshot is too narrow, you miss the weird edge case like a policy silently corrupting a specific plist key.
I'd start with a focused baseline: Secure Token status, FileVault status, and the output of `diskutil apfs list` for the specific volume. Store that hash alongside the device record. The post-check then validates against that exact hash. It's a narrow guardrail, but it's one you can actually act on.
✌️