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PDQ Inventory heartbeat scan

Okay so I am not sure if I am using the heartbeat collection correctly. So I am scanning for a registry flag on machines and created a inventory collection for that. I have a scan profile that looks for that registry flag and is set to heartbeat. I want this collection to populate for new machines that are recognized. Is heartbeat the best way to do this? For a new machine that joins the AD will this heartbeat scanner pick it up without having to have a full interval scanner scanning all the machines. 

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6 comments
Date Votes
  • Sahildesai,

    The heartbeat condition only triggers when a machine in Inventory goes from offline status to online status. For that reason, I usually always combine it with an interval scanner, because otherwise if a machine stays on for a very long time it will never get hit by the heartbeat scanner.

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  • Thing is I am looking for it to hit when it first comes online for the first time only. Basically want to use this collection for newly imaged machines. 

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  • Is your goal to modify a registry entry on every machine as soon as it first shows up in PDQ Inventory? In that case I would just have a PDQ Deploy package with both a heartbeat & interval trigger that targets a PDQ Inventory collection. Have the dynamic collection in PDQ Inventory only contain machines that have the unmodified registry value and have the Deploy package trigger a rescan of the target computer after deploying. You may need to add this registry value to one of your scan profiles if you have not already.

    If you use this method then you don't have to worry about redeploying to the same machine twice because they will automatically fall out of the PDQ Inventory collection after they get the deployment once.

    I guess I'm just not understanding your reluctance to use the interval trigger.

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  • Okay hopefully I can explain better this time. So new machines will have a registry flag tattoo'd on to them during its imaging process with MDT. I have a collection in PDQ Inventory to look for that registry flag and specific value attached to that flag. I have a PDQ deployment that deploys itself to the machines in this collection. So for example, I image machine1(with that registry flag and value) i want it populate into that collection so pdq deploy can trigger a deploy to the machine asap. My PDQ deploy also has a step to modify the value of this registry flag so that it gets removed from the collection. Now for me to get the collection populated with machine1 after imaging asap what is the best scanner for this? 

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  • Ok, in that case I would suggest using the method I listed in my previous response, with the addition of adding that registry value into your default scan profile. That way as soon as a machine shows up in PDQ it will do its initial scan, find the registry value, and place it into the dynamic collection.

    PDQ Deploy will then find the machine in that collection using either the heartbeat trigger or the interval trigger (you could make the interval quite aggressive, e.g. every 10 minutes) and then the Deploy package will modify the registry flag and trigger a re-scan of the computer so it falls out of that collection.

    You could also check the box in the Options tab of the Deploy schedule to stop deploying to targets once they succeed if you want to really make sure that you don't get repeat deployments to the same machine. You could also do something like have the first step in the Deploy package as a scan step and then have the subsequent steps have a condition to look at that registry value, so if the machine got picked up again and it tried to re-deploy it would fail on subsequent deployments when it checks the actual registry value.

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  • Thank you for all your help! I appreciate it. I think ya that's my biggest concern now is to not have it deploy again since the interval is short, the deploy won't be done until it triggers it again. I can add a step right at the start to flip the value that only runs if the value is set to the default otherwise deployment stops. Does a scan in deploy with the scan profile i made to check for the flag trigger a scan despite the trigger setting in inventory on the scan profile? If i add a step to scan and the value is changed will it change the collection group right away?

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