SCCM Integration question

[baherne]

Hi all,

Appreciate it if someone can help me with this question from an FNMS On Prem customer.

Our FNMS design utilises SCCM to bring in the vast majority of our client estate inventory as we have done for quite some time including in FNMP. Whereas the FNMP integration was completely customised the FNMs integration is out of the box which is a much better situation all around.

As I understand it the integration works at a database level as opposed to utilising SCCM views. Microsoft’s recommendation is that views are used rather than connecting to the database because they may at some point deem it necessary to change the database schema and as such reserve the right to do this as they see fit. To ensure that users of SCCM are not adversely affected by these changes they recommend using Views for any integrations.

What I’m keen to understand is the rationale for going against this recommendation? To the uninitiated it feels like a risky approach that could affect all Flexera customers that use SCCM with FNMS.

Thanks in advance.

[kclausen]

We have researched this in the past and found that the Views that come out-of-the-box in the SCCM database schema do not contain all of the data that FlexNet Manager requires - this is why we directly go after the tables in columns in the native database schema.

In the Release Notes of each version of FlexNet Manager we publish the versions of SCCM that we have tested our adapter against.  To be honest, we have not found any issues since the 2012 release.  

[mrichardson]

Kirk is correct, however it should also be noted that we do use Views where possible, there are a number of steps where we pull from SCCM objects prefixed with v_ for example v_Site or v_GS_SYSTEM_CONSOLE_USER and these are views.

As Kirk mentions, we use tables only if there is not a view available that contains the level of information we need to make the integration successful.

[flexeranoob]

I have a quick question. I have tried to validate the SCCM outputs against what Flexnet Agents collect, and it seems that Flexnet agents collect a greater amount of info, specifically, SQL Edition information. SCCM was nor able to provide me with the SQL Edition info.   Are you able to get information such as this from SCCM.  If so, how?  If not, what tilted your opinion in favor of SCCM against the Flexnet agents.

[mrichardson]

Hi @flexeranoob 

In order to identify SQL Server edition requires collection of WMI evidence from a special SQL Server specific namespace.

By default, the SCCM agent only collects WMI evidence from the default namespace which is root\cimv2 whereas we've enhanced the FNMS agent to collect from other namespaces to collect SQL edition data, Hyper-V guest machine data etc.

This is because we know this information is needed for licensing and as that is where our focus is we want to ensure the FNMS agent collects this.

It is technically possible to collect this using SCCM however it requires customizing SCCM which often isn't supported by Microsoft, once a standardized method from Microsoft is available, we could enhance our SCCM readers to pull this from the SCCM DB.