Fleet Introduces Industry-First Open-Source, Cross-Platform Device Management (MDM) Platform

Open-source mobile device management (MDM) pioneer Fleet announced availability of a new programmable MDM, designed to give medium-to-large organizations control of remote workstation security with unsurpassed GitOps and workflow automation. Fleet’s availability as an open-source MDM not only makes it more accessible to organizations working to reduce costs, but also allows users to configure the platform to their own needs without having to pay additional fees or experiencing delays.

Providing out-of-the-box support for macOS, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS, Fleet can be easily configured to share data across teams, and is seamlessly integrated with third party platforms and DevOps processes via a REST API. This allows IT engineers and admins to easily run queries, access data and customize application development and delivery processes. It also provides bidirectional transparency, giving end users visibility into what is being monitored and helping organizations establish and maintain employee trust while ensuring data security.

Key features of the new platform include:

• GitOps-driven consensus model enables close collaboration among security, developer and operations teams while ensuring a secure roll-out of delicate write operations.
• “Bring your own” capabilities for scripting and packaging tools lets IT use the tools they are comfortable with while ensuring that organizational requirements are met.
• Closed-loop feedback on deployments means IT never needs to worry about whether the configuration made it to the machine.

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“We wanted an open-source way to build an MDM that is easy to integrate with Puppet in our configuration-as-code environment,” said the platform engineering manager for one of the world’s top online games developers. “The reason for that is two-fold – we want to control and deliver the best possible experience for our employees and make security happy. Fleet was the obvious, and really the only, choice.”

“Organizations today have complex needs and rely on multiple tools to manage and secure endpoint devices across multiple device types and operating systems,” said Gabe Knuth, Senior End User Computing Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “FleetDM’s unique approach to cross-platform MDM can help customers integrate with existing tools and workflows while consolidating and streamlining management and security processes.”

Fleet’s intuitive dashboard features one-click visibility and control, enabling IT to easily manage devices from any location or platform. It enables automatic enrollment of new employees with Okta or any identity provider, IT management of software updates and patching with any software manager (Puppet, Munki, Chef, etc.), disk encryption (for macOS) using Apple FileVault, remote locks and wipes and includes all of the CIS critical security controls for Mac and Windows. Fleet also supports multiple user accounts and in-depth activity auditing so teams can easily share data across different departments without security risks or privacy concerns.

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“The visibility and ease of integration with other systems that we provide is truly unequaled in the market today,” said FleetDM co-founder and CTO Zach Wasserman. “Fleet is built for programmatic automation. Automating audit logs with third party platforms like Splunk is much easier with Fleet. In addition, other platforms let you push updates to computers and turn on disk encryption, but if you want to see whether it actually worked you can’t – there’s no feedback mechanism for that and no way to see what’s actually happening. With Fleet, you can say, ‘Turn on FileVault,’ and then run a query that says ‘how many computers have FileVault turned on?’ and you’ll see that it was 100% successful.”

Fleet is based on the open source project osquery, co-developed in 2014 by Wasserman, then working at Meta. Wasserman co-founded Kolide in 2016 and created Fleet, an open source platform that made it easier for enterprises to use osquery. The Fleet community took over maintenance of the open source project in 2019, with Wasserman serving as lead maintainer. Wasserman partnered with FleetDM CEO Mike McNeil in 2020, announcing the transition to a stand-alone entity in November of that year. Having announced its Series A funding round in 2022, Fleet now has more than 1.6 million computers – including enterprises, governments, startups, families, and hobbyists all over the world – enrolled.

“Fleet is built for results,” said McNeil. “We empathize with the leaders we speak to everyday who are stuck having to choose between out-of-the-box legacy MDMs or building their own on-top of a hodgepodge of unsupported open-source libraries. We built Fleet to bridge this chasm. We first built a battle-tested open-source platform that security teams trust, and then layered on top of it the configuration and APIs that IT teams want to see. We see the future of IT being unlocked by a devops mindset, and we aim to be at the forefront of that revolution.”

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