One bit of important information that can be a challenge to view in one easy-to-see location is what all is being inventoried during your Configuration Manager 2012 client’s hardware inventory cycle.
You could certainly go into Administration –> Client Settings –> Default Client Settings –> Hardware Inventory –> Set Classes and export this to a MOF to view, but a MOF file isn’t in a nice, easy-to-read format for us human types.
Another option you may decide to use is to launch PolicySpy.exe which is included in the Configuration Manager 2012 toolkit, and manually peruse through the various entries to see which properties are inventoried, one line at a time.
I could probably go on for an hour listing out all the ways to get this information from wbemtest to wmic to vbscript, to archiving XMLs on the clients, to taking pictures of your screen with your digital camera, BUT I will instead save my time as well as yours!
A much better way that I personally prefer to use is to run a PowerShell command-line such as the following:
gwmi –Namespace root\ccm\policy\machine\actualconfig –Class SMS_InventoryAgent_Policy | Select ItemClass, Properties | Sort-Object ItemClass | ConvertTo-HTML | Out-File C:\temp\test.html
Of course you can save this html file to any path and filename by simply modifying the path and filename at the end. Once this runs, just double click the resulting .html file which it created, and you’ll see a nicely formatted and sorted list of WMI Classes and associated properties which are being inventoried on your clients.
Of course you could use convertto-csv and out-file filename.csv instead of saving it to html, but that is totally up to you and your needs.
This method of determining what all you’re inventorying in your hardware inventory on your clients seems very quick, easy, and as a bonus seems nicely formatted. I really hope you find it helpful!
Until next time…