Skip Disable Software Inventory on a particular Folder|SCCM|ConfigMgr

In this post, we will discuss the options available to skip/disable software Inventory on a particular folder or drive. Skip Disable Software Inventory on a specific Folder.

Introduction

Software inventory enabled on the wrong folder/s, or Drive/s can make your life miserable as a ConfigMgr administrator. We had a bad backlog issue because of the incorrect configuration of the software inventory.

Disable Software Inventory
Disable Software Inventory

Loads of people in the ConfigMgr community (real world) don’t use software inventory at all. They’ve better methods like Asset Intelligence etc.. to do the work. So before enabling software inventory, it’s always better to check whether it’s required or not.

Note (Just to give background) – \Sinv.box\BadSinv folder:: This folder stores corrupted software inventory files. A backlog of files can indicate problems with specific clients, management points, or networks, causing data corruption.

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Following are the details which will help you to configure software inventory properly.

Finding

  • – All the child primary sites have a large BADSinv folder.
  • – The folder size is more than 1.5 GB for all the child primary servers.

Possible Impacts

  • – The software inventory will not produce accurate results as there are lots of rejections on inventory files.
  • – SCCM backup is taking long time to finish.
  • – SCCM exec performance will be impacted because of extended run time of SCCM backup.

Possible Cause

  • – All the large inventory files are from SCCM secondary servers because of the software inventory task ran against packages in DP folders. SCCM is collecting all the data like exe, dll files in each application package.
  • – As SCCM don’t have initial software inventory data for the SCCM secondary servers as well as for some clients over and above these clients are doing resync and re sending FULL inventory.
  • – If the full software inventory report from the client is larger than the configured max size (5 MB by default) then those files will be moved to BadSINV folder.

Solution

To Skip the Software Inventory from a particular Folder / Drive:: Create a hidden file named Skpswi.dat and place it in the root of a client hard drive (SCCM secondary server DP drive) to exclude it from software inventory.

You can also place this file in the root of any folder structure you exclude from software inventory. This procedure can be used to disable software inventory on a single workstation or server client, such as a large file server.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632671.aspx

Adaptiva

Increase the Max file size settings in primary child servers to ~25 MB  (as per the requirement in the environment ) to cater to the FULL inventory. Goto

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SMS\Components\SMS_SOFTWARE_INVENTORY_PROCESSOR Increase “Max File Size” to 25 MB or whatever as per design.

“No Warranty for this solution” always test your solutions in the test environment before implementing the same into a production environment.

Resources

Anoop is Microsoft MVP! He is a Solution Architect in enterprise client management with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. E writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc…

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