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Create Report to Diff Installs on pairs of Machines

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Nicholas Tripp

We have a scenario where we keep a second desktop for every user available at our DR site.  We want to create regular reporting to make sure that all the applications that are installed in Production machine exist on that user's DR machine.

Anyone have suggestions on the best way to do this in PDQ Inventory?

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4 comments
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  • Avatar
    lnichols

    Nicholas,

    How many desktops are we talking about here? Is there some kind of naming scheme in play that reflects whether a machine is at the live site or the DR site? Are the desktops at the DR site in hot standby (i.e. plugged in and turned on)?

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    Nicholas Tripp

    VDI, always on. There is a naming scheme, but the number isn't too great to manually match them. It's the side by side comparison or a highlight for mismatch in software install?

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    lnichols

    Hm... I don't think this is something that you can do natively in Inventory but it should at least be a valuable tool to get you started. You could do an auto report in CSV format that just pulls the Default "Applications" report for each machine periodically. That report has fields for application name and application version, which will allow you to know what applications and which version of them are installed on every single machine.

    That's where Inventory's job would probably end, I'm afraid-- I would use PowerShell to loop through the CSV files and compare the production vs the DR machines. That's why I asked about the naming scheme-- that would make this much easier to pull off programmatically.

    You can set the report's path and file name in the "Details" tab of the auto report. You could have a scheduled task scanning that location for a new version of the report and then automatically comparing. I would probably have the PowerShell script loop through each pair of machines, compare the CSV results of each machine, and log any inconsistencies to some kind of log file. It could them email you the alerts.

    If that's over-engineered for your use case then you could also just manually compare the applications report of each pair of machines.

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    Permanently deleted user

    I don't know if this is quite what you were asking for, but I believe it's at least similar: https://gist.github.com/Colby-PDQ/c03e7eee22a73c9b1dcbe81aaa9b18e6

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