Client Management Suite

Hi there,

we're running ITMS 7.6HF4.

As we want to use ITMS as primary Inventory Solution we discovered that there are lot of computers with an inaccurate inventory. By inaccurate I mean that there is sometimes only partial information about installed software, sometimes none. See screenshot.

The odd thing with this computers is, that from an inventory standpoint they have sent data and are fine. So I'm not certain how widespread this is at all.

So I've two questions:

• How can I determine such computers? I didn't found a default report which covers that
• What remediation steps are necessary to clean this up?

I had one time luck with a) delete computer from the console b) reset guid on client and c) Delete Inventory on the client. But that's a quite manual of doing this and not really scalable.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

Do you run a Full (not Delta) Inventory monthly?

Hi andykn101,

we're running full every Tuesday (weekly) and Delta every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

This morning I noticed that when I run a custom Inventory Task which is looking only for SW/HW it fills up the Inventory almost immediatly.

So that would be the remediaton. But how can I identify such computers?

That is quite an aggressive inventory schedule, look at your event queue (c:\programdata\Symantec\SMP\EventQueue\EvtQueue) and NS log on the server when the inventory is being performed.

The EvtQueue is empty. Sometimes I just see a file for a very short amount of time.

So you suggest a less aggressive schedule, right? Full once in a month and Delta weekly?

If your event queues can handle it your schedule is OK, users might complain if they notice the frequent disk usage. Pick one computer where the inventory is missing and run through the troubleshooting steps here: "Troubleshooting Inventory Solution 7.5, also 7.1" http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO95562

We noticed a similiar problem.  Many computers would only have the name of the OS in the softwaqre inventroy.  also if you removed an application that deletion would not be reflected in the software inventory.  

Altiris keeps a local file of the inventory that  it appears can in some cases not update properly.  Try running the following powershell as system against an affected computer and regather inventory.  

$strFileName = "C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Agents\SoftwareManagement\data\softwarecache.xml"
If (Test-Path $strFileName){
	Remove-Item $strFileName
}

if it works you can schedule that on a regular basis (it does't hurt anything to delete this file)

I tried your suggestion to remove the softwarecache.xml file on three computers and it worked like a charm! Thanks for that hint :)

my pleasure.