Microsoft SCCM (and MDT) are great tools that provide a robust system to lay down OS images onto many clients. Once setup, SCCM admins and technicians can easily image computers all day every day without thinking about how much time and money they’re saving the company. Rather than just telling your boss you’re making progress on something like the Windows XP replacement project you’ve got going on why not give her/him real, hard numbers of how many devices you’ve been knocking out over the past 6 months?
To do this we’re going to need to build a SCCM report. We need a report that will show us, historically, how many PCs we’ve imaged over a set amount of time. I’m also going to go out on a limb and say we want this report to update automatically and to not require any kind of intervention. Do I have your interest? I hope so!
Before we get started building this boss-loving and beautiful report we should first outline how it will work. Retrieving historical data from the database server in a report requires a few different steps which I’ll be discussing in this article series. In part 1 of the series I’ll show you where the information is stored on the client that you’ll need to gather to determine if the client was imaged with SCCM or MDT. Once I know what I’m looking for I’ll then go over how to get this information into the SCCM database through creating a custom hardware inventory class.
In part 2 of the series, I’ll go over how to verify that the hardware inventory class was setup correctly by going over the pertinent logs and show you what query I created inside the SCCM console to quickly ensure the clients are sending the right information to the database.