Sometimes the Kolide Menu Bar App does not display on macOS

[terracatta]

Occasionally, the Kolide Menu Bar app does not show on the macOS menu bar even though the Kolide agent is working correctly.

This problem most commonly occurs immediately following the installation of a macOS update. Subsequent restarts are not affected. I believe it may be related to a specific installation/temp user that appears right after a restart.

This occurred for me personally after installing macOS 14.1.1

[johnmarzella-immutable]

I have experienced similar behavior on Ubuntu after initial agent install.

[RebeccaMahany]

@levicole reported seeing this on Dec 11 after a macOS update. Running launcher version today made the menu bar app reappear. I also noticed this behavior after a macOS update today with a completely different app -- the menu bar app did not appear until I ran the app's version subcommand on the command line. @directionless 's theory is that macOS may hide apps that have not been interacted with recently.

[directionless]

I have experienced similar behavior on Ubuntu after initial agent install.

Hi @johnmarzella-immutable I suspect that's going to be a different issue, there may be more than one in play. In your Ubuntu case, does it eventually show up? There might be some kind of X11/wayland confusion

[RebeccaMahany]

I've seen this after my last two macOS software updates. I have two launcher installations A and B running simultaneously. Last time, I believe both menu bar apps did not display; this time, A displayed but B did not. (Based on PID, I think the install that showed up had restarted its desktop process more recently.

I triggered a notification to B, and while I received the notification, that did not cause the MBA to reappear.

Killing the desktop process for B, causing it to be re-spawned by launcher root, did cause the MBA to reappear. This info also aligns with only A showing up originally -- A had desktop processes with much larger PIDs, indicating that it had maybe restarted its desktop process more recently, thus fixing the issue for that install before I could observe it.

If we are able to detect that we are in this state, we can probably remediate in this way, by restarting the desktop process.