From time to time you need to compare what software are installed on two computers. For example when using a test environment to test a new release of a software you want to make sure the test environment has same version installed as the production environment. Service Manager includes all this information as it synchronize it from Configuration Manager and Operations Manager. Unfortunately there is no out of the box report or feature to do this. I guess we could do it with Service Manager Powershell but for an Orchestrator geek like me it is much fast done with a runbook J

Figure 1 shows the master runbook. It invokes three other runbooks, one to gather all installed software, one to compare installed software and one to find all software installed on both computers. The solution use a temporary SQL table to store data. The result, a report, is sent to the Service Request “requester” by e-mail. In the start of the master runbook there are three Service Manager Activities, these are used to get the “requester”. The Send Email activity in the end use this information to send the report file.

Figure 2 shows runbook 8.3.2. This runbook first drops the temporary table if exists. The temporary table is named based on the computer name, if we have ran a comparison before, we delete the temp table. The master runbook will also delete temporary table, but if there is a “left over” from another job it is deleted in the 8.3.2 runbook and also we want to make sure no old data is affecting our new report. The 8.3.2 runbook gets all the installed software on one computer and insert it into the temporary SQL table. The runbook insert both software display name and GUID. Two software could be named the same, so then we also compare GUID of the CI. If we were interesting in installed patches we could use Software Updates class instead of the Software Items class. We run runbook 8.3.2 once of each computer.

Figure 3 shows runbook 8.3.2. This runbook use a SQL query to find software installed on one computer but not the other one. We run runbook 8.3.2 once for each computer.

Figure 4 shows runbook 8.3.4. This runbook use a SQL query to find software installed on both computers.

Figure 1. Master runbook

Figure 2. Runbook 8.3.2

Figure 3Runbook 8.3.3

Figure 4 Runbook 8.3.4

I use Service Manager Portal to submit a service request which will start a runbook activity, runbook 8.3.1. Figure 6 shows an example report, delivered by e-mail. The report is very basic, built in HTML. You could re-design it easy by changing HTML code in the runbook.

Figure 5

Figure 6 Report

You can download the runbooks, CompareSoftware. Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production ready solution, just an idea and an example.