Collecting detailed hardware scan information

Available from 9.2.12. You can collect the detailed hardware information by running the Collect Detailed Hardware Information task in the BigFix console. To retrieve the data use the relevant REST API.

About this task

Limitations

  • Detailed hardware scan cannot be collected if you use the disconnected scan.
  • The output of the detailed hardware scan cannot exceed 100 KB. This limit should be enough for most endpoints. However, if it is exceeded, the results will not be imported to BigFix Inventory server. Information about exceeding the limit of 100 KB is returned by the Detailed Hardware Information analysis.

Considerations

  • If a piece of information is not applicable to your system, or cannot be retrieved, the detailed hardware scan returns no value, or the value equals "-1".
  • In case of virtual systems, such as, VMware, Hyper-V or KVM guests, the scanner might not be able to retrieve the accurate value of some physical machine attributes. The physical system information is emulated by the hypervisor and the scanner cannot access the host system properties directly. The level of similarity between the virtual devices and the actual hardware depends on the virtualization technology used.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the BigFix console.
  2. In the navigation tree, click Sites > External Sites > BigFix Inventory > Fixlets and Tasks.
  3. Select Collect Detailed Hardware Information, and then in the lower pane, click Take Action.
  4. Select computers from which you want to collect the detailed hardware information.
  5. Optional: By default, the scan repeats every week. However, you can customize the frequency of the scan according to your needs. Select Execution tab and modify the Reapply this action section.
  6. Click OK.
  7. To populate the scan results to BigFix, activate the Detailed Hardware Information analysis.
  8. Wait for the scheduled import, or run it manually.
  9. To retrieve the detailed hardware information, use the relevant REST API call. For more information, see: REST API for retrieving detailed hardware information (v2).

Results

The API call returns the detailed hardware information about the computers in your environment.

You can check the status and the date of the last scan in Detailed Hardware Information analysis.