Comparing Chromebook settings across OUs to find and fix policy gaps

The easy way to audit Chromebook user settings, device settings, and managed guest session settings, and ensure policy consistency across OUs

Last updated June 12, 2024

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Why it's worth auditing your Chromebook settings

Chromebooks offer an overwhelming amount of customization through the Google Admin Console, with hundreds of settings and complex organizational structures for your devices.

Even if you understand each Chromebook setting well (or just follow our guide to the recommended user settings) it can be difficult to keep your settings consistent across your OUs. Common difficulties include:

Many OUs with fundamentally the same purpose (e.g. "Student" OUs within dozens of different schools)
Forgetting to update one OU when you change another
Collaborating with multiple admins making different changes to different parts of the OU tree
Old changes that have been forgotten about
Inherited settings causing subtle differences between OUs

Comparing settings OU-to-OU the easy way

With Instinctive, there's now an easy way to visualize the setting differences between your OUs and quickly fix them. Using the policy compare tool, you can select two OUs and immediately see the similarities and differences between the OUs. Any settings with differing values bubble to the top of the page.

Two different Student OUs with different settings? You'll probably want to fix that. Just click one of the two Copy buttons, depending on which setting you want to keep. You can copy the setting from the left OU to the right, or the right OU to the left. Your setting will be updated, both within Instinctive and within the Google Admin Console.

Using setting exports to track and compare historical changes

With Instinctive's setting export feature, you can download a backup of your settings to a simple file on your computer. Just search for an OU and then click Export Chrome Settings.

Using this file, you can backup and track your policies on a historical basis and keep a known good configuration in case you ever need to reset your settings. You can even use your export within the compare tool.

From the settings compare tool, either drag and drop the export file into the box, or click the box and browse your computer's files to select the export. Once you do, your settings will load instantly and you can compare to another export file or to a live OU.