Microsoft has released Enhanced Hardware inventory providing greater device inventory detail on Windows devices. IT administrators can add additional hardware properties to devices providing better insight and understanding of their device estate.
The prerequisites for this feature are pretty basic. The devices must be running Windows 10 21H2 or Windows 11 21H2 at a minimum. The feature is primarily designed for corporate owned devices. Also of course the devices must be Intune managed.
To enable the enhanced device hardware inventory you will need to deploy a Properties catalog profile, select the required inventory properties and deploy the profile to your estate.
The profile can take up to 24 hours to deploy though it’s typically much faster and starts reporting after only a few hours. Note that the profile does not report back its installation status on devices. Once deployed the reported inventory is refreshed every 24 hours where you will receive continuous updated inventory reports of the devices in your estate. A device inventory service agent and accompanying windows service will be pushed out and installed to the assigned devices. This agent drives the inventory activity, it gathers and reports the WMI data locally from each device every day. This is a lot faster and easier than running remote device queries on connected devices to get the similar information.
To view this data there is a new open the Resource explorer tab of a device with the inventory Properties catalog profile assigned. Currently a total of 97 device inventory properties are supported including for Example CPU, Bios Info, Battery, TPM, Video Controller and Windows QFE. A good example of the data provided would be the device battery where you can now see the battery charge and design capacities, charge cycles and even the cycle count.
Note that these currently are device based results, as in you have to select each device individually and open the Resource explorer to view the properties of that device. In the future hopefully there will be better device estate reporting but this does lay down a good foundation to build on. Also the inclusion of additional cross platform support including MacOS, iOS and Android is expected early next year.