Remote scanning through a Management Point is one of the 5 mechanisms that can be used to gather inventory with Sam360.

Remote scanning is usually quicker at gathering inventory than deploying a dedicated inventory agent, but it does have some drawbacks

1. It depends on certain services being enabled and accessible on the target device. (e.g. WMI, ‘Remote Registry’)
2. It may have difficulty passing through firewalls, proxies, subnets etc.
3. It can not gather detailed software metering information. The deployment of an agent is required to achieve this.

The Sam360 Management Point can use either Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) or ‘Remote Registry’ to remotely scan a device for software & hardware inventory. Using both interfaces helps increase the chance of successfully scanning the device. The Management Point uses the following steps until one of them is successful.

1. Use WMI to execute s3tools.exe on the remote device. Copy the resultant inventory data file back to the Management Point.
2. Use WMI to remotely query the device for its software and hardware data.
3. Use Remote Registry to remotely query the device for its software and hardware data.

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If both the WMI and Remote Registry services are disabled, but the Management Point can successfully connect to the remote device’s Service Control Manager service, it can temporarily enable the required services and re-query the device.

If an ‘Access Denied’ error is received during the scan, the Management Point can re-query the device with any other credentials that have been specified using the Management Point configuration tool.

If the device can not be located (e.g. it is not switched on, it is off the network, it is blocked by firewall etc.) the Management Point will continue to query it on a daily basis at randomised times during the specified scan period.