Updates

Note: Services are decommissioned on July 1st 2026; June 30th 2026 is your last day of access.

The following is the information being sent to all free and paid users regarding agent decommissioning, cloud data, and accounts.
 
 - What you need to know (3 things and dates)?

1) Agents: DNS records for individual buckets will be removed on 1st July 2026. From this date, agents that have not been uninstalled will be unable to write to their cloud buckets, as all bucket hostnames will resolve to localhost/127.0.0.1 by default. Agents are safe to leave installed, but will silently fail and waste minimal CPU -- uninstalling before or after July 1st is best practice.

Agent uninstall info/package/options: https://github.com/pansift/p3#uninstalling

Note(i): This is the only action required on your end.

2) PanSift Web Application: Accounts and subscriptions will continue to operate until June 30th, 2026 (June 30th is the last active day; systems are decommissioned on July 1st). The service, accounts, and all subscriptions (free and paid) will be terminated on July 1st, and no logins will be possible after that date.

Note(ii): Paid users may optionally switch back to a free account at any time, in advance of this date, but as per normal, they will be subsequently prompted to reduce their agents to the free limit of 2 agents (by uninstalling excess agents > 2).

Note(iii): All PII (email addresses, profile info, usage logs) will be deleted 2 months later on 1st September 2026 (unless you request so for an earlier date).

3) Timeseries Cloud Database(s): All agent metric data in our Influx cloud databases has always been subject to a strict 30-day retention policy -- there is no data export function, as data is rolling by design. All remaining data will be automatically deleted 30 days after the last agent write. If you would like your bucket data purged sooner, we will happily action this for any bucket IDs you provide.

I'd like to thank you sincerely for embracing PanSift and hope it provided some utility and value that wasn't easily found elsewhere at the time. If you're looking for alternatives, you might find value in nOversight for macOS (https://www.numerousnetworks.co.uk/noversight), Auvik (https://www.auvik.com/), or NetBeez (https://netbeez.net/remote-worker-monitoring/).

Any questions, comments, requests, or feedback are welcome at [email protected]

The PanSift agent 0.6.9 has been updated to address the macOS 15.3 (Sequoia) SSID name redaction. Even "sudo wdutil info" is now redacting the SSID name (not just the BSSID). We've had to adapt again to this, but thankfully the SSID is still available elsewhere.

Candidate installer file (v0.6.9): https://pansift.com/dl/candidate_pkg <-- click, check "Downloads", and then open!

The PanSift agent 0.6.8 has been updated to be compatible with macOS 15.x (Sequoia) betas, although we're still waiting for Apple to make a Privacy Preferences Policy Control (PPPC) Profile or keys available that don't prompt the user for local network access during installation.

Upgrade file (v0.6.8): https://pansift.com/dl/latest_pkg <-- click, check "Downloads", and then open!

The PanSift agent 0.6.7 now uses "sudo wdutil info" for macOS 14.4 and above (older macOS will still use the airport CLI tool). This new approach with "wdutil" is the first time the agent requires any elevated user privileges, and as such, the installer now adds a dedicated file called "pansift" to the directory "/etc/sudoers.d". This allows the targeted user account *only* to explicitly run "wdutil info" as part of the agent's stats collection. We do not enable arbitrary wdutil commands, just "wdutil info", and only for the user account logged in during install.

This means we can continue to get metrics such as MCS, number of spatial streams, and country code, but we can also restore information regarding the connected AP(Access Point) BSSID and OEM vendor. The "pansift" sudoers file is removed during uninstallation. It is viewable on macOS machines at "/etc/sudoers.d/pansift". We welcome all and any feedback as we strive to provide insights and make the invisible visible.

Upgrade file (v0.6.7): https://pansift.com/dl/latest_pkg <-- click, check "Downloads", and then open!

We are working on a newer agent to replace the current version 0.6.5 due to the deprecation of the airport command line utility in macOS 14.4. PanSift made heavy use of this utility to get specific Wi-Fi data and metrics. We already use a mix of utilities to get this data but need to adapt to this deprecation. This may mean having to utilize some higher privileged command levels and native APIs/SDK. Note: We had hoped to always run PanSift with the most minimal permission set, but Apple is making this harder ;)

The PanSift web application receives daily/weekly deployments for features, tweaks, and fixes. Code moves from local to staging to main (production) via our CI/CD pipeline built on Github Actions. The latest PR (Pull Request) and associated deployment address a long-standing creeping memory utilization issue (which was being intermittently masked by deployments and phased-restarts!).

We've upgraded from Ruby 3.0.1 to 3.0.6 with jemalloc to address better memory management and leaks. This updated ruby version also addresses the latest security updates for the 3.0.x train. The puma gem has also moved from 5.4.0 to 5.6.7 with additional fixes and optimizations. Additionally, work was performed to more cleanly complete and close remote API calls made using the influxdb-client-ruby gem (used extensively for our real-time graphs, reports, and insights). 

Note: In future, we will move to the Ruby 3.1.X train, but it currently has too many breaking changes due to issues with the pysch gem and other problematic dependencies. We also don't normally post web application updates here unless they are substantial features or notable fixes...  happy troubleshooting!

A delayed announcement, but Reports is now live for buckets (based upon your chosen SLE's and tolerances).

Note: Also, the agent binary is now v0.6.1 with some minor bugfixes and tweaks (like additional WLAN states and OSX version nuances). Please update your agents to the latest version v0.6.1