Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

I have found over time that our inventory seems to be incomplete.  For example, we have many machines that do appear to be reporting their hardware serial number.  Upon further investigation, I've found that pulling S/N from Inv_AeX_AC_Identification, I get more results than from vAsset.  Also, In same cases, computers had returned the serial number from vAsset, but not Inv_AeX_AC_Identification.  Are these the best tables to pull this data from?

Does anyone know what may cause these discrepancies?  I am using the following code:

SELECT

a.[Name],

MAX(h.[_eventTime]) AS 'Last Agent Config Request',

i.[department],

c.[User] as 'Primary User', a.[OS Name], a.[Hardware Serial Number] as 'AC Serial Number',

    b.[Serial Number] AS 'vAsset SN',

b.[Model], b.[Manufacturer],

c.[IP Address], c.[MAC Address],

    g.[Distinguished Name] as 'OU',

d.[Total Physical Memory (Bytes)] as 'Memory (bytes)',

e.[Max Clock Speed (Mega-hertz)] as 'CPU Speed'

FROM Inv_AeX_AC_Identification a LEFT OUTER JOIN vAsset b ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = b.[_ResourceGuid]

FULL OUTER JOIN vComputer c ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = c.[Guid]

LEFT OUTER JOIN Inv_HW_Computer_System d ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = d.[_ResourceGuid]

LEFT OUTER JOIN Inv_HW_Processor e ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = e.[_ResourceGuid]

    LEFT OUTER JOIN vResourceEx f ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = f.[GUID]

    LEFT OUTER JOIN Inv_OU_Membership g ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = g.[_ResourceGuid]

LEFT OUTER JOIN Evt_NS_Client_Config_Request h ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = h.[ResourceGuid]

    LEFT OUTER JOIN vAssetDepartmentOwner i ON a.[_ResourceGuid] = i.[_AssetGuid]

WHERE g.[IsDirectMember] = 'True'

GROUP BY a.[Name], c.[User], a.[OS Name], a.[Hardware Serial Number], b.[Serial Number],

    b.[Model], b.[Manufacturer],

    c.[IP Address], c.[MAC Address],

      g.[Distinguished Name], d.[Total Physical Memory (Bytes)], e.[Max Clock Speed (Mega-hertz)], i.[department]

ORDER BY Name

Any pointers appreciated.  Thanks.

The serial number field in the basic inventory is NOT the system serial number, if that is what you are looking to track. As such, I doubt it is part of VAsset, but just a WAG at this point.

Jim,

This is confusing to me.  I ran a report that returned the Serial Number field from both AeX_AC_Identitfication and vAsset and in all cases the serial numbers match and represent the actual system serial number.

What is the WAG you are talking about?

Bryan

We struggled with this one ourselves and also had the same qeustion with the asset numbers. We noted mulitple places in the DB that contain the HW Serial Number and HW Asset Tag number - collected by various parts of the SMP system.

Using the Serial number as an example it can be found in:

• Inv_HW_Chassis - Collected by Hardware Inventory Policy/task
• Inv_AEX_AC_Identification - Collected by Agent Basic Inventory
• Inv_Serial_Number - Tricky one this... Entered by Asset solution manually or filled by the Inventory to Asset Synch CMDB rule (only when there is no value in there already ie. fills empty values)

Basically what we do in our environment is work down the list, so the Serial Number is the one in Inv_Serial_Number or if thats empty we use a custom inventory grab from the machine, or if thats empty we use the Inv_HW_Chassis one, or if thats empty we use the the  Inv_AEX_AC_Identification one. It basically an SQL CASE statement working down the options.

We speed this up by having a custom data class to hold the combined Asset and Serial numbers and run a regular CMDB rule to combine the sources above to it and  then when we want to query it we look at an already calculated class.