PENDING Query to find newly imaged MECM systems?

[net1994]

Hi All – We need to send software to all PCs that were imaged by MECM after 03/18/22. Any system before this date doesn’t need it. This will also be an ongoing, long-term rollout of all new PCs, not just the previous 3 months.

To ID these systems, one query I thought of was to set it by the Operating System install date attribute. However, we can’t use that as we regularly upgrade our Win 10/11 system builds and so if a PC was imaged in February, then we upgrade it to 22H2 (for example) when released, it will then get the software it already has.

I then created a collection based on the system creation date:

select * from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.CreationDate >= "3/19/2022 3:45:10 AM"

This seems to yield better results. However, some systems are showing up even though they were imaged in October of 2021. I was thinking it’s because the server team upgraded MECM and the local MECM client on PCs was updated, which may have changed the ‘Creation Date?’ Not sure.
Can you think of a better query for this purpose?

 

[Prajwal Desai]

How about deploying that software through task sequence during imaging itself.

 

[Garth]

as for you query itself, that is the best way to get what you are after but it will NOT be prefect.

 

[net1994]

As for the idea about adding it to the task sequence, that wouldn't really work. We have multiple different installers based on different geographic regions. It's more efficient/easier to just have those installers run against the appropriate AD Workstation OU collections we created in MECM after the system is imaged. And we also have to cover any system in the last 3 months that were imaged, but didn't get the software. Oh boy!

 

[net1994]

@Garth
Tell me about it! I posted the same original question here, in the Microsoft Q&A forums. I said right off the bat that the query running by OS install date, would be "less reliable" than when the SCCM agent was first installed on the Windows device. Then a responder this morning, said to do it by the OS date. Oh man....

But as you said it won't be perfect, I've already seen that. (And what do you mean by not perfect in caps? I'm worried it will cause a much larger issue down the road that is easy to prevent this week.) When I run the query and get 100 or so results, about 5-10 are false positives. We have techs when they image a system, they sometimes assign the exact same name as before. Thus a PC name shows up I'm 98.998% sure shouldn't be there. Other things like this. But 90-ish % accuracy is 'good enough' at the moment.

 

[net1994]

Another idea I just had was to combine the query for creation date as well as the OS install date in a single query. Not even sure if that would work with a AND statement in the query syntax for both? Thoughts?

OR, add the whenCreated attribute to our AD System discovery for the systems I need to ID after this hard date. Then I'm thinking/hoping, I could base the collection off just that. Perhaps. Thoughts?