Flexera Agent is not Tracking Serial Number of New MAC with M1 Chip

[chirag_sharma2]

Flexera agent is not tracking Serial Number of M1 based macs because they do not have bios/boot rom. No mgs_bios class data is written to an ndi as the result. since that is where the agent retrieves the information, no serial number is inventoried.

Anybody has any solution?

Is it the problem with Apple or a design issue with Agent ?

[kclausen]

Just curious as to what version of the FlexNet Agent you are using.  Flexera has only tested the 2020 R2 Agent against this new OS X Platform.

[chirag_sharma2]

Hi @kclausen 

FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R2 Part Number: 16.0.0.

Best,

Chirag

[kclausen]

@chirag_sharma2  - Thank you for confirmation.  In that case, I would see if you get any feedback from other members of the Community.  Have you submitted a Support Ticket for this?

[chirag_sharma2]

Yes @kclausen , Support is saying that M1 based Macs do have no BIOS/boot ROM. No MGS_BIOS class data is written to an NDI as the result. Since that is where the agent retrieves the information, no serial number is inventoried.

[mag00_75]

Hi@chirag_sharma2 

There where a very short period of time the 16.0.0 agent was the valid one, have you tried 16.0.1?

Flexera released 16.0.1 just a few days after the 16.0.0 agent to support the M1 chip. We have the 16.0.1 on our MAC's but sofar it has not yet been deployed onto an M1. Will you let know when I see the first machine

[weskus]

Has newer agent versions (>16.0.1) resolved this issue. Checked the inventory agent change logs but there were no mentions?

[ChrisG]

@weskus - the 2020 R2 (16.0.x) and later agent versions do gather serial number details from M1 Mac devices. However current versions of FlexNet Manager Suite do not import or report on this serial number data on inventory device records, so even though the data are gathered you can't easily see them.

An update to the inventory import process to import the M1 serial number details that are gathered by the agent is currently being considered for a future release.

(For future reference, Flexera's Master Issue ID for this issue is IOJ-2191525.)

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

To come back to this thread, a fix for the IOJ-2191525 issue noted in my previous reply has been made for inclusion in the FlexNet Manager Suite Cloud July 2021 update (see a complete list of resolved issues here) as well as the FlexNet Manager Suite 2021 R1 On-Premises release.

[ChrisG]

For reference, the following article is related to the issue discussed in this thread: Known Issue: Serial numbers are blank on inventory device records for Mac devices that use the M1 chip (IOJ-2191525)