Mac Agent Installation

Before you can use N-able N-central to monitor and manage computers at a customer's site, you need to install the agent. The Mac agent monitors local services and reports any issues.

There are customer-specific and generic system installers.

The customer-specific installers are pre-configured with activation keys, registration token, customer names, and IP address of your N-able N-central server. As the customer-specific installers are very easy to use, we recommend that you make them your first choice when downloading the agent or probe software.

Generic system installers require you to specify either the activation key, or the IP address of your N-able N-central server and a customer name or customer ID. These installers are useful when you want to keep a copy of a certain version of the agent or probe offline.

As of 2023.4 the N-able N-central server requires a valid certificate set up on the server. This includes any certificate where the whole chain is validated to a root certificate authority (CA) within the system trust store. You must apply either a globally signed and recognized certificate or a certificate from your own private certificate authority. For any private certificate authority generated certificate, you must update the N-central Trusted Root Certification Authorities Certificate Store. In addition, you must also update the Trusted Root Certification Authorities Certificate Store for any endpoint so that the endpoint is able to connect to the N-central server.

Before installation

Create Universal Administrative Account(s)

You need a universal administrative account on every macOS device to facilitate agent installation. It is recommended that you create at minimum one account for your workstations and a separate account for servers.

Allow Access to Required URLs

You need to have allowed access to the required URLs. For more information, see Networking Requirements.

Check Supportability

The macOS agent supports the following operating systems:

macOS Agents

14.x (Sonoma)
13.x (Ventura)
12.x (Monterey)

Installation Methods

You can install the Mac Agent using the following methods:

Method	Description
Customer-specific installer	Use the registration token for a specific customer to install the Mac agent.
Generic system installer	Use the agent installer to install the Mac agent.
dmg-install.sh script	Use the dmg-install.sh script to install the Mac agent.
Silent install	Use a probe to install the agent for a silent installation.

For troubleshooting installation issues, see the Knowledge Base.

To upgrade the agent, see Upgrade a macOS agent.