Inventory is Not Detecting Mapped Drives and Network Printer information

Products

• Inventory Solution

Issue/Introduction

Hardware Inventory doesn't capture Mapped Drives or Network Printers in the Logical Disk data class.

Cause

When an Inventory Policy runs under the System Account or an account that is not the logged-in user, we do not have access to capture the user-specific information, such as mapped drives and printers that the logged-in user possesses.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, configure an Inventory Policy to run under the logged-in User so that their drive mappings and printers are captured.

1. Go to Manage > Policies > Discover and Inventory > Inventory > and create a new Policy to use as the user-specific policy.
2. Click on the Advanced button in the Policy Rules/Actions section.
3. On the Data Classes tab, make sure the Inventory data classes are selected:
   1. Hardware\Common\"Disk Partition", "Logical Device" and "Printer"
   2. Hardware\Windows\"Printer Windows"
   3. Software\Windows\"Device Driver Windows"
4. If file details are desired, click on the File Properties Scan Settings tab. Under the Drives tab click on Include drive > select Network drives > click ok .
5. Click on the Run Options tab and select "Logged in user" under "Run Inventory as" (by default System account is selected).
6. Make sure the inventory policy is enabled and schedule it to run.

This will result in the user's mapped drives and printers being captured, and network drives being scanned by the policy. The data can be queried from the Inv_HW_Logical_Disk table with a SQL query like the following example:

select vComputer.Name, 
vComputer.[User], 
Inv_HW_Logical_Disk.[Device ID],
Inv_HW_Logical_Disk.[Description],
Inv_HW_Logical_Disk.[Provider Name]
from Inv_HW_Logical_Disk
left join vComputer on vComputer.Guid = Inv_HW_Logical_Disk._ResourceGuid
where Inv_HW_Logical_Disk.[Device ID] like 'V:'

Depending on your environment and security, you may want to have a separate Inventory Policy for most other data classes. The logged-in user may not have rights to access WMI and other functions used to capture system data.

 

NOTE:  If you have two Inventory Policies enabled that both write to the same data classes and one runs as "System Account" and the other runs as "logged-in user" then your results such as mapped-drives and printers will only reflect the last Inventory Policy that ran.