Deploying Custom Hardware Inventory in ConfigMgr 2012 R2

Part of maintaining a secure environment is to understand the membership of your local groups, primarily Administrators. Something that is becoming more common for this is to use Configuration Manager Hardware Inventory to discover memberships across your environment.

I won't get into the details of actually configuring the custom inventory, but I can say it involves creating a new WMI class and adding that to your inventory policy. The best way to perform that is to use baseline configurations, but let's say there are clients that don't create this new class. You will get errors for those clients, and they may stop performing hardware inventory altogether, which could cause backlogging.

When you do this custom hardware inventory, it's very important to target the inventory policy to the clients with the custom WMI classes. If you're using baseline configurations as in my example, you can easily create a dynamic query to add those members, and then deploy the Client Settings to that collection.

Here's the query for my specific baseline. As you can see, I've filtered it to Client Installed = 1, the Baseline scope ID, and finally Compliance State = 1.

 

Here is an example of a new Client Settings policy specific to Hardware Inventory Local Groups.

Now all you need to do is deploy this Client Settings policy to the dynamic collection and you'll be golden!