Location Mapping in Hardware workflow not working when multiple IP addresses found from SCCM

Dennis_de_Jager

Hi,

Is there a way of selecting the most recent IP adress from the information from SCCM without tweaking SCCM?
Our Computers inventory hardware every 7 days, I want this to be every day, but since it remembers all the IP addresses in the inventory data, the location for the connected hardware asset will not be update anymore.

I want the location to be update daily, because this is what happens within our Company, employees are always travelling over the world.

Is this possible?

pzerger

Getting only the "primary IP" is tough largely due to  lack of consistency across environments. This MS thread has a query I have used for this purpose with success in a couple of situations. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/b5f720f0-48ae-4793-81b5-114d28831857/sccm-sql-query-ip-address?forum=configmgrgeneral. 

With the Cireson Asset Import Connector, you could actually use this query to bring the data in directly to the class of your choice, as long as it's in a sealed MP. No custom automation required. 

allen_anderson

The problem is there is no datetime information that comes from ConfigMgr for an IP address or subnet so we have no way to determine which IP address is the most recent to associate a location.  This is all done by the OOB ConfigMgr connector in Service Manager and we have no way to modify its behavior.

Currently, AM will throw warnings it its logs if 2 or more IPv4 addresses are detected from ConfigMgr.

A work around would be to leverage the SCSM workflow framework or Orchestrator to to overwrite the ConfigMgr IP data for network adapter related to a Computer CI.  This assumes that you have a mechanism to determine which IP address is the correct one at that time from the ConfigMgr data.

Jon_Runheim

The IP data is in our case most useful when tracking PC's, and it's only valuable if it's accurate.
Have you (Cireson) got any response from MS's on this?

shaun_ericson

This is an interesting dilemma, and we haven't pinged MS either about this. Let me share this with the internal Cireson product team and get back. 

seth_coussens

Is this possible? These are my favorite questions! I'm a firm believer with SCSM and some Powershell, anything is possible!

This is a tricky one though, and based on the information given by Allen above I think one possible solution is to have the computer itself update its IP through a secondary means. Depending on your use of Azure automation, the computer could run a Powershell script regularly to trigger a simple webhook with some data to update the network adapter data for that machine is SCSM. 

Ive done something like this previously and it's definitely something our services team is capable of helping with. 

If if you need something more on prem (computers are always inside the network) you could have the machine update a csv and use the AM import connector to update the information from there. 

The he options are many!

Geoff_Ross

Further, if your DNS is healthy, you could query this to find the latest IP of an asset. Even if it has multiple records, you can find the one with the latest timestamp. There's a PowerShell module for DNS so that makes it quite straight forward. Make sure this process runs after Config Mgmr connector but before Cireson Hardware Sync Workflow. Again, services team can help if needed.

allen_anderson

Another way to do this is to create an SCSM task on the computer CI form to check for the latest IP.   You can hit DNS to get the latest IP address for a given hostname.  That data can be saved to the computer CI under a new extended property so that its not overwritten by the ConfigMgr connector.

Jon, what are your requirements?

allen_anderson

Geoff_Ross said:

Further, if your DNS is healthy, you could query this to find the latest IP of an asset. Even if it has multiple records, you can find the one with the latest timestamp. There's a PowerShell module for DNS so that makes it quite straight forward. Make sure this process runs after Config Mgmr connector but before Cireson Hardware Sync Workflow. Again, services team can help if needed.

You and I are on the same page, sir!

seth_coussens

Using the DNS assumes the computer is not behind a firewall or router separate from SCSM. If it's on the same network, this should work great. 

Dennis_de_Jager

Good brainstorming on a saturday! The source of the IP could be DNS and I like the "change the data with more reliable data" option, both Azure Automation and Orchestrator are available, so I can try this for now.

But in our environment we lose track of almost 25% of laptops because they never connect to the corporate network anymore. Since SCCM isn't available from the internet ( a 5 year old wish to get this implemented ) I have no source, a simple Azure based webhook would be great for this and I actually see a good idea for a new Cireson App

Thanks for thinking with me and there is 1 thing I'll check and that is the order of the reported IP adresses, it might just be the order in which they were discovered.

I'll get back on this.

Jon_Runheim

Hi Shaun,

We'd just like the best way to have an ootb updated IP-adress on the CI in SCSM  
Much of the brainstorming above will help even though I'd like to be able to rely on the feed from SCCM as a starting point before moving over to workarounds. In ootb SCSM this doesn't provide much value but becomes much more important when transforming SCSM to an ITAM tool.
As Cireson ITAM feels like the most demanding add-on-solution for SCSM I think that Cireson has good opportunities to feed MS with enhancement requests for this kind of functionality.

We'd want to use this functionality for workflows when an owner (likely a manager) wants to identify all the PC's in his/her department.
Some PC's will need additional info to be found and will then need to be identified via the last IP.

pzerger

Getting only the "primary IP" is tough largely due to  lack of consistency across environments. This MS thread has a query I have used for this purpose with success in a couple of situations. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/b5f720f0-48ae-4793-81b5-114d28831857/sccm-sql-query-ip-address?forum=configmgrgeneral. 

With the Cireson Asset Import Connector, you could actually use this query to bring the data in directly to the class of your choice, as long as it's in a sealed MP. No custom automation required. 

Dennis_de_Jager

Im going to try that first thing tomorrow!