Intune hardware inventory is now available

As announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Intune now comes with an advanced hardware inventory. This new feature is available in Intune Core (P1) and does not need any addon as Intune Suite. The rollout to all tenants seems to have been started a few days ago as I see it arriving on out tenants.

Properties Catalog

To get started with the new hardware inventory, we just have to create a policy of the newly introduced type “properties catalog” that looks similar to your familiar settings catalog policies.

On the first page, we can give the policy a name:

Then we will see a page that looks really familiar to everyone that used settings catalog before:

Here we can add the properties that we want to collect from our devices:

Once we assigned our scope tag to the policy, we can assign it to our devices:

On the Review and create page, we can verify our selected settings and create the policy:

Client experience

So now that we have created our policy, what will happen on our endpoints?
A new Inventory Agent will be automatically and silently installed using the MSI LOB channel of the MDM stack, similar to the way the EPM Agent gets installed if you assign an EPM Policy to the client. You can see that in the Enterprise Desktop App Management Registry Hive:

This new agent gets installed into Program Files and also writes its own log files here:

Intune

Now that we have configured our inventory and seen what happened on the client, we want to actually use this data. We can find it in a new blade in the individual device view called “Resource explorer” that may look familiar to Co-managed admins that got the data from tenant attach from an ConfigMGR:

Here we can now select a category and see the details that we collected earlier, like battery details:

Or a list of all physical disks:

Conclusion

The addition of hardware inventory to Intune P1, closes one more gap that in the past required us to either go the co-managed route with ConfigMGR or collect the inventory differently, like we did using a PowerShell remediation script and a Azure Cosmos DB: PowerBi Reports for Advanced Windows Client Inventory Data – Part 1 – Mike’s MDM Blog