SCCM Computer Usage Reports

[pmaryan]

We have SCCM 2012R2 installed around our campus and I've been asked to pull reports for computer usage. I believe they want to know which computers are being used on a daily basis. Is this something that can be pulled from SCCM?

 

Thanks!

[Norphy]

Hmm, not really. I think the closest that you'll get will be Software Metering which logs how often a piece of software on a PC is used. If you're just looking to see which computers are being used, you could turn on AD auditing and gather the information that way. Alternatively, there are login scripts out there which put an entry into a database whenever someone logs on. Or you could use a piece of software like Userlock to track logons. There are options but for this I don't think SCCM is one of them.

 

I'm happy to be proven wrong if someone knows a way though

[JRowley]

There are a couple of reports you can do to help you get an idea, but there is to my knowledge no definitive report. Assuming you have reporting configured on SCCM and your SQL server then you could look at the following reports:

 

• Clients that have not reported recently (in a specified number of days)
  
• Computers not inventoried recently (in a specified number of days)
  

 

You could also detect the last time a computer account logged into the domain, which would give you perhaps a better idea. For that you will need to modify your active directory discovery method to get an additional attribute, which is called 'lastLogon'. Having done that you will need to create your own report that uses SQL to lookup this value (and some others for identification) and convert the timestamp to a readable date format.

 

The idea being that the computer account should login to the domain everytime the computer starts at the very least, so if computers aren't being used the date will reflect that. You could then modify this to compare the current date with the stored date to show you how many days have passed since the last login for even easier reporting.

 

You will of course encounter issues if sccm wakes the computers to do installs as that will trigger the login and will not reflect true usage, for that you would need to do something that checks when the last user logged into the machine, which is probably possible but I haven't attempted to do that through sccm.