How To Report Monitor Locations and what Computers they are Connected To

Products

• Inventory Solution

Issue/Introduction

 

Resolution

Inventory Solution does not provide reports to show the information that Hardware Inventory collects on Monitors. Also companies may want to know where the monitors are located. This article presents an example script for a custom report that shows Monitor Serial Numbers, the computers they are connected to, and the locations of those computers.

Prerequisites:

1. Ensure that a Full Hardware Inventory policy is running frequently to detect when Monitors are moved or added to computers. The Collect Full Inventory Policy and Collect Hardware Inventory policies will both collect Hardware Inventory. To track the monitors every day disable the Collect Delta Hardware Inventory Policy and clone a new Inventory Policy then configure it to run Daily, select only Hardware and operating system... for data to be gathered, and disable Send inventory changes (deltas) only in the Run Options tab of the Advanced Options.
2. Manually create Locations and automatically assign them to Computers based on the Computer's IP address
   • How to use the CMDB task Update Network Resource Location to automatically assign locations to computers based on the computer's subnet

Creating the Custom Report:

Go to Reports and right-click on a folder where the custom report will be created, select New>Report>SQL Report. Give the report an appropriate name such as "Monitors by Computer and Location", then paste the following query into the Parameterized Query box:

select vComputer.Name [Computer], Inv_HW_Desktop_Monitor.[Serial Number] [Monitor Serial Number], vLocation.Name [Location] from Inv_HW_Desktop_Monitor

left join vComputer on Inv_HW_Desktop_Monitor._ResourceGuid = vComputer.Guid

left join ResourceAssociation on vComputer.Guid = ResourceAssociation.ParentResourceGuid

left join vLocation on ResourceAssociation.ChildResourceGuid = vLocation._ResourceGuid

where ResourceAssociation.ResourceAssociationTypeGuid = '05de450f-39ea-4aae-8c5f-77817889c27c'

Note: Symantec Support does not support custom reports so modifications to this report must be figured out by the user. The report is limited in that it will not show Monitors that are not connected to active computers because Inventory Solution cannot detect them. Also the report does not show Monitors with Computers that have not been assigned a Location due to the "where" statement in the SQL script.