You are getting some advice to avoid of the things you asked about. That's OK advice for an end user, but since you are in IT it is understood that sometimes, you have to get to the bottom of things on someone else's Mac and what is built into OS X does not always do the job.
Accordingly, the items on your list are not really maintenance. They are diagnostic. In other words, they are not necessary to use on any Macs running normally. On normally running Macs, OS X has many built-in self-diagostic and correcting routines. Therefore, what's below are only for use when something has gone wrong.
~Luke wrote:
Clean Caches and remove unnecessary clutter/buildup (like Cleaner for Windows)
Onyx has good options for this. Though again, I never "clean up" a Mac except to solve a problem or change a hidden system setting due to personal preferences.
Excessive or unnecessary cache cleaning slows performance, since the entire point of caches is to optimize for performance. After caches are cleared, the Mac will be slower until the caches complete rebuilding.
~Luke wrote:
Test Memory
I like running Memtest from another volume, like a USB stick. Again, not necessary to test except to diagnose a problem.
~Luke wrote:
Check for and remove Malware/Viruses
I have used ClamXAV in the past, I have heard good things about Malwarebytes and Eset. But there are so few Mac exploits actually in the wild (especially relative to Windows) the the majority of end user issues with malware are not in the Mac itself but remotely based, like when end users click on phishing links in a web browser. Prevention through user education is the most effective here.
~Luke wrote:
Check Hard Disk health and scan tools
Apple Disk Utility and fsck in single-user mode help diagnose and maintain the disk directory. For serious disk directory problems, these are not enough, and DiskWarrior must be brought in. There is no better disk directory repair utility than DiskWarrior. But that only takes care of the disk directory. For the disk itself (e.g. scan for bad sectors), in the past scanning utilities were used, but drives are so much larger now they are not so practical to run. The emerging advice is that if a Mac is experiencing disk errors, especially those listed as I/O errors in the Console, the drive should be replaced before the problem spreads and destroys more data. In other words, once you see disk errors piling up there is no point in scanning the disk because you're not going to fix it in software anyway, the hardware's already going bad, back up now and get rid of the drive before you regret it.
For getting details on the health of an internal SSDs/solid state drive, I use Disk Sensei.
~Luke wrote:
Check battery health, fans and other useful information
Battery health is available in System Profiler, and Battery Condition is available if you Option-click the battery icon in the menu bar. For other statistics I use iStat Menus, but since it is installed in the menu bar it may not be what you want to use to diagnose an end user's Mac.
There is a great deal of system health and status information in the System Information utility which is accessible from the About this Mac command. Finally, you should know about Apple Hardware Test if you don't already.
