Software/Hardware Inventory – Re-enable - Best Practice

[shawn.pederson]

About a year ago we were asked to disable our SCCM 2007 hardware and software inventories.

 

It was determined that running them during production hours in our environment with a custom schedule caused a drastic performance hit. For obvious reasons (WOL, software license compliance, client health etc.) I would like to re-enable this bad boy.

 

I have been doing quite a bit of research so I am not going in blind with my recommendation (of re-enabling these features) but thought I would reach out to you guys for some suggestions. If anyone could provide some insight into the follow questions I'd greatly appreciate it:

1. Both the Software and hardware inventories are pulled locally via a WMI query and then sent to the site server via IIS in a .DDR file, correct?
   
2. The main logs I'm interested in for trouble shooting are:
   
   • Client side – CCMExec.log, FileSystemFile.log, InventoryAgent.log, MifProvider.log
     
   • Site side – Sinvproc.log, Datatde.log
      
     

[*]Is there any way to enable this without the inventories running globally in production?

[*]Is there any easy method to determine the performance hit from this WMI query?

[*]Is it better to run these on a simple schedule or a custom? (I’m thinking simple to ensure they all don’t run at the same time.)

[*]Does anyone know a method for disabling the CCMExec service remotely on multiple machines?

[*]Are there any “got chas” I should be concerned with in re-enabling this with the drastic amount of changes done since they were disabled? (i.e. new clients, stale software records, client push installation etc.)

Hopefully that makes sense. Thanks everyone.