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fleet/articles/fleet-desktop.md
Noah Talerman 4aa15497dc
Fleet Desktop guide: Add link to app (#40030) 
Co-authored-by: Allen Houchins <32207388+allenhouchins@users.noreply.github.com>
2026-02-24 09:13:06 -05:00

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Fleet Desktop

Fleet Desktop is a self-service portal for your end users. It shows up in the menu bar on macOS and system tray on Windows/Linux.

Fleet Desktop unlocks two key benefits:

  • Self-remediation: end users can see which policies they are failing and resolution steps, reducing the need for IT and security teams to intervene. Available in Fleet Premium.
  • Scope transparency: end users can see what the Fleet agent can do on their machines, eliminating ambiguity between end users and their IT and security teams

If your end users have a hard time finding Fleet Desktop in the macOS menu bar, you can deploy this Fleet Desktop app.

Install Fleet Desktop

For information on how to install Fleet Desktop, visit: Adding Hosts.

Upgrade Fleet Desktop

Once installed, Fleet Desktop will be automatically updated via Fleetd. To learn more, visit: Self-managed agent updates.

Custom transparency link

Organizations with complex security postures can direct end users to a resource of their choice to serve custom content.

The custom transparency link is only available for users with Fleet Premium

To turn on the custom transparency link in the Fleet UI, click on your profile in the top right and select Settings. On the settings page, go to Organization Settings > Fleet Desktop > Custom transparency URL.

For information on setting the custom transparency link via a YAML configuration file, see the configuration files documentation.

Secure Fleet Desktop

Requests sent by Fleet Desktop and the web page that opens when clicking on the "My Device" tray item use a Random (Version 4) UUID token to uniquely identify each host.

The server uses this token to authenticate requests that give host information. Fleet uses rate limiting and token rotation to secure access to this information.

Successfully brute-forcing this UUID is about as likely as you getting hit by a meteorite this year.

Rate limiting

To prevent brute-forcing attempts, Fleet rate-limits the endpoints used by Fleet Desktop on a per-IP basis. If an IP requests more than 1000 consecutive invalid UUIDs in a one-minute interval, Fleet will ban requests from such IP for one minute (fail requests with HTTP error code 429). This rate limit algorithm is used to support deployments of Fleet where all hosts are behind the same NAT (all hosts mapped to the same IP).

Token rotation

ℹ️  In Fleet v4.22.0, token rotation for Fleet Desktop was introduced.

Starting with Fleet v4.22.0, the server will reject any token older than one hour since it was issued. This helps Fleet protect against unintentionally leaked or brute-forced tokens.

As a consequence, Fleet Desktop will issue a new token if the current token is:

  • Rejected by the server
  • Older than one hour

This change is imperceptible to users, as clicking on the "My device" tray item always uses a valid token. If a user visits an address with an expired token, they will get a message instructing them to click on the tray item again.