Prevent import of obsolete SCCM inventory on disconnected Beacons

[Liebi123]

Hello Community,

one of our customers uses disconnected Beacons, in other words beacons installed on dedicated servers and disconnected from the main FNMS application server, to inventory individual network segments. To capture the devices installed in the network segments, the respective SCCM databases within these environments were connected to the beacons.

However, after the successful implementation of the SCCM connections, we realised that the SCCM administrators were not cleaning the databases. This results in a large number of obsolete inventories.

Our objective now is to modify the SCCM Reader so that it does not consider inventories older than 90 days as "Relevant Computers". We also want to delete already imported obsolete inventories from the FNMSCompliance database. From my point of view it should be sufficient to adjust the step "BuildRelevantComputerList" in the Computer.xml, but this did not bring the desired success. The obsolete inventories were not deleted on the ImportedComputer_MT. 

In the case that disconnected beacons are used, the reader step "Find deleted computers when disconnected" also seems to play a role for the cleanup.

However, I don't know how this step can be done successfully if the beacon doesn't have a direct SQL connection to the FNMSCompliance DB.

Has anyone already had experience with this customization at disconnected beacons or has an idea to successfully implement this modification?

Thanks and best,
Alex

[ChrisG]

A few points to hopefully fill in some gaps for you here:

• Steps with an execution mode of ExecuteOnTarget (of which the Find deleted computers when disconnected step is an example) are executed once the data reaches the FlexNet batch server--these steps are not executed on the beacon.
• The BuildRelevantComputers step is not the right place for put your modification here. This step identifies which computers have updated data to be imported, but that list of computers is not used to determine which computers have been deleted.
• Try putting your filtering to only get data for computers active in the last 90 days in the GetSMSHostComputers step. I an thinking the records that are not retrieved in this step may then flow through to impact the detection that Find deleted computers when disconnected step does to identify deleted computers.

[Liebi123]

Hello Chris,
thank you for the quick feedback. Are you sure you mean the GetSMSHostComputers step? From my point of view, this step only returns one result. Apparently this query only returns the database of the SCCM server:

Did you mean the step ReadComputerNames? In this step, the reader goes to the table Computer_System_data, which in my view contains the collected machines. Interestingly, an INNER JOIN is used here to join the #RelevantComputer table. That's why I thought I had to modify the BuildRelevantComputerList step.

Best
Alex