[Feature]: Targeted Failure Remediation

[abercrombiejc-cloud]

What problem are you trying to solve?

It would be helpful for the user and support if when MHC is run again after one or more warnings or failures were found only the targeted failure(s) would be checked, saving time from re-checking all items. Here's a perfect example I experienced on my own Mac just today:

I ran MHC and it found two items to address: My Downloads folder files were taking up too much disk space; my Homebrew version needed to be updated. I cleaned out over 80 GB of data in Downloads and updated Homebrew to version 7.0.6 (the newest). I then re-ran MHC and everything came out healthy. But it had to check all 40 items before I knew this, when it would have been much more efficient to check only those two items.

Proposed behavior

A date-stamped log file could be created when MHC runs the first time noting the failed items so that the log could be consulted when MHC is run again to quickly identify what needs to be checked again.

Alternatives you have considered

Another option would be to have a button to re-check just the warned-about or failed item(s) on the Results Overview popped-up remediation window. (I don't remember the exact name now that I've resolved the issues on my Mac. Sorry!) But if the Results Overview is not intended to be left open an indeterminate amount of time that might not be a good idea. For "quick fixes" it would be, though!

Which part of the project would this affect most?

End-user dialog experience

Who benefits most?

Both

Anything else

In thinking about this, if this were implemented, there ought to be an initial query to the user when running MHC to ask how the user wants to run the check:

1. Check items that failed or were warned about previously?
2. Check all items?

For #1 only the "failure log" would be consulted to target just those items for the check. For #2 no log would need to be checked.

[dan-snelson]

Thanks, @abercrombiejc-cloud; a targeted post-remediation verification makes sense, especially when a full Mac Health Check run takes several minutes.

I plan to implement the requested outcome without creating a separate date-stamped failure log. Mac Health Check already writes a canonical report at /var/tmp/MacHealthCheck-Report.json, including each check’s stable key, status, value, remediation guidance, and report timestamp.

Planned behavior:

• When Self Service starts, validate the existing report and its device, MDM, script-version, and age metadata.
• If the report’s full-run baseline is less than 36 hours old and contains warnings, failures, or errors, automatically rerun only those checks.
• Show only the selected checks in the progress dialog.
• Match checks by .checks[].key, not display name or vendor-specific list index.
• Merge rechecked results into the prior full report, preserve untouched results, record per-check timestamps, and recompute the overall summary.
• Generate the Inspect summary from the merged report so it still represents the complete check set.
• Fall back to a full run whenever the cached report is missing, stale, malformed, belongs to another Mac or MDM, uses another script version, or contains an unmapped check.
• Preserve Force Fresh Run as the explicit full-run override.
• Keep Silent, Debug, Development, and Test behavior unchanged.

This also requires changing the current 15-minute Inspect replay behavior: unresolved findings must trigger verification instead of reopening stale results without rerunning their checks.

The existing report can already produce a useful human-readable summary:

sudo jq -r '
"",
"Mac Health Check 4: Recent Warnings & Failures",
"",
"Hostname: \(.metadata.hostname) (\(.metadata.localHostName))",
"Timestamp: \(.metadata.timestamp)",
"Overall Status: \(.summary.overallStatus)",
"Healthy: \(.summary.healthyCount) | Warning: \(.summary.warningCount) | Fail: \(.summary.failCount) | Error: \(.summary.errorCount)",
"",
(.checks[]
| select(.status != "healthy")
| "- \(.name): \(if (.rawValue? | type) != "string" or .rawValue == "" then .message else .rawValue end)"),
""
' /var/tmp/MacHealthCheck-Report.json

[dan-snelson]

Initial attempt available in 4.2.0b4