Where does the ADDM connector look in order to retrieve the OS information for the detection of OS applications?

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Summary

Where does the ADDM connector look in order to retrieve the OS information for the detection of OS applications?

Question

Where does the ADDM connector look in order to retrieve the OS information for the detection of OS applications?

Answer

OS information for a virtual machine can be found in three places of Inventory Device Properties:

1. The Hardware tab: This is the raw or sometimes processed or normalized operating system as defined by the inventory source.

2. The VM Properties tab: This can be the configured operating system for the virtual container (particularly VMware virtual machines) or it can be the raw operating system. This field is not expected to be particularly accurate or reliably populated.

3. The Applications tab: This is the operating system as normalized by FNMS using either WMI or installer evidence.

For ADDM, these properties are populated in the following ways:

1. The os property of the Host node. See the "Read computer details into FNMP" step of Computer.xml which gets details using the "Host Nodes" query in the FnmpADDMSettings.xml.

2. The config_os_full property of the DiscoveredVirtualMachine node or the vm_guest_os of the SoftwareInstance node. See the "DiscoveredVirtualMachine Nodes" and "SoftwareInstanceVirtualMachine Nodes" queries of FnmpADDMSettings.xml respectively.

3. The WMIEvidence.xml tries to produce something which will match the FNMS ARL as best as it can. It sets a WMI Caption property using the os property of the Host node and a WMI Name property using the os_type property of the Host node. Both of these come from the "Host Nodes" query in FnmpADDMSettings.xml.

In summary, the important operating system information mostly comes from the Host node in ADDM and the os property in particular. Of note is the fact that ADDM does do some processing to this property which does mean that it will no longer be the raw information that FNMS would prefer to receive. As such, the FNMS ARL may require updates to support operating system applications identified by evidence from ADDM.