CMpivot = Configuration Manager goes real-time!

I have worked with SMS/SCCM for many years now and the last 20 years a common question has been “we need to know which computers have a specific file present now!” or “we need to know which computers that have this software installed and we need to know it now”. We have never been able to fulfil that request because things take time, inventory interval, inboxes with backlogs as a result and so on. It can be done with right-click tools but that requires permissions and access to all computers. CMpivot works through CMG as well and for clients that are connected to the MP! But now in 1806 we can finally do it with CM Pivot, amazing!!

CMPivot which has been in Technical Previews before makes it possible to query computers in real-time using the channel that was developed to support Malware alerts fast instead of sending it together with a client policy check or some other scheduled task in Configuration Manager. So finally, the security guys which I would say that most requests come from can get their answer faster than “tomorrow or later this week”.

CMpivot queries the context that you start it in, so if you start CMpivot from the Ribbon when you have selected the “All Desktop and Servers” collection that is what the scope of the result. What can we more do? We can create Collections based on the result and export the result.

How do I get started? CMpivot uses a subset of the Azure Log Analytics data flow model as shown in the help above. The easiest way to test the power of CMpivot is to simply click on a link in the Home tab and then use that query as a start, adding operators and count to it, it really makes sense after a while. Select in this case CCMlogs, the we get the query to query ccmlog.

Then we can easily add “| “ sign so we can filter the result. Then the UI will help us with what values that are valid.

That way we can easily within a few seconds modify the query to only show all lines which starts with Execute.

What is the next step? I would start looking into my RBAC delegation because more than SCCM admins will want to use this feature with the power it brings.

A simply amazing feature and one of the biggest mindset changes to Configuration Manager for a long long time!