How to identify newly installed software assets?

Eric_Krasner

How do you identify when a new software asset is introduced into your environment.  It seems straight forward for HW Assets, but not so much for software assets.  Has anybody had any experience with this?  Thanks.

Nicholas_Velich

Hi Eric,

For HW, it is a bit more straightforward because the HW Asest Sync workflow will create HW Assets when a new Computer is pulled in via AD/ConfigMan connector. For the most part, you always want these HW Assets created, so it is done automatically.

The SW Asset creation process is a bit more manual and for good reason: a great deal of Software is detected via Configuration Manager and pulled into SCSM, but not all Software is considered a Software Asset. For example, if you have Chrome installed, the Configuration Manager connector will bring in a SW item named "Google Update Helper"-- not particularly useful. For each SW item, you have to consider if its worth tracking as a SW Asset, and if so, a unique pattern to link that SW Item to a SW Asset must be created.

That being said, if you needed to be able to quickly see which Software items were not already linked to a SW Asset, you could do so in PowerShell. Example for a single SW Item:

$SoftwareClass = Get-SCSMClass -Name System.SoftwareItem # Get the Software class
$SWItem = Get-SCSMObject -Class $SoftwareClass | select -First 1 # Get the first object of this 
Get-SCSMRelationshipObject -ByTarget $SWItem | ?{$_.SourceObject.ClassName -eq "Cireson.AssetManagement.SoftwareAsset"} # Get relationships between this SW item and a SW Asset

You could adjust the above to loop through your SW Items to see which do not have an association. That might be a good way to identify new ones.

Thanks,
Nick

Nicholas_Velich

Hi Eric,

For HW, it is a bit more straightforward because the HW Asest Sync workflow will create HW Assets when a new Computer is pulled in via AD/ConfigMan connector. For the most part, you always want these HW Assets created, so it is done automatically.

The SW Asset creation process is a bit more manual and for good reason: a great deal of Software is detected via Configuration Manager and pulled into SCSM, but not all Software is considered a Software Asset. For example, if you have Chrome installed, the Configuration Manager connector will bring in a SW item named "Google Update Helper"-- not particularly useful. For each SW item, you have to consider if its worth tracking as a SW Asset, and if so, a unique pattern to link that SW Item to a SW Asset must be created.

That being said, if you needed to be able to quickly see which Software items were not already linked to a SW Asset, you could do so in PowerShell. Example for a single SW Item:

$SoftwareClass = Get-SCSMClass -Name System.SoftwareItem # Get the Software class
$SWItem = Get-SCSMObject -Class $SoftwareClass | select -First 1 # Get the first object of this 
Get-SCSMRelationshipObject -ByTarget $SWItem | ?{$_.SourceObject.ClassName -eq "Cireson.AssetManagement.SoftwareAsset"} # Get relationships between this SW item and a SW Asset

You could adjust the above to loop through your SW Items to see which do not have an association. That might be a good way to identify new ones.

Thanks,
Nick