Meshcentral: Feature Request: List installed Software

[ghplw]

As well as retrieving hardware information it would also be great to be able to list all the installed software and versions with a log that shows when software is added, updated or removed and the option to provide alerts on these changes.

[Ylianst]

Good request. Bryan needs to add support for this in the MeshAgent.

[PathfinderNetworks]

Along with this it would be extremely beneficial if it could also pull/track the licensing info for those applications that let you see it (for software tracking/auditing purposes).

[ghplw]

I think pulling licensing would be difficult as there is no standard way of doing this and a lot of software is cloud based licensing now. My understanding of the scope of MeshCentral (at least at this time) is to focus on getting information and tools for support, troubleshooting and maintenance rather than managing software deployments and licensing.

That said, once the bulk scheduled scripting components are implemented you could use that functionality to automatically pull that information for the apps you use and push that out to a file or even an online database.

[Ylianst]

Agreed that there is no standard way to get license information. Bryan has been looking today at getting installed software list on Windows and he made progress on that. Once in the agent, there is plenty of server-side work required.

[johnnyq]

Oh YES! much greatly appreciated feature, I would love to see what these users add to their system and keep up with it.. So much excellent work is going on

[Ylianst]

Yes, that is coming. I think Bryan added this to the agent for Windows.

[openmoto]

This would be a great feature addition.
If possible, some reporting features that may be helpful.

1. List all software per computer in a group
2. Same as first one but only show software installed in the past x days
3. Option to email report to admin, group managers or both.

[leleb]

I'll appreciate this option very much

[MailYouLater]

Going briefly back to the concept of pulling licencing info, that sounds like a great idea for a plugin once that API becomes more complete. I wonder what the feasibility of having plugins depend on each other is.
@ryanblenis: Could there be a License Information plugin that provides the core licence tracking functionality, then have separate plugins to gather the actual license information from each of e.g. MS Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc. that depend on it to present the info they've gathered in the web UI?

And going back to the topic at hand:

I think Bryan added this to the agent for Windows.

@krayon007: Is this accurate? Is the agent already able to acquire the list of installed software? or is this still a planned future development?

[ryanblenis]

As it is currently implemented, plugins can access any MeshCentral properties, such as the MongoDB instance and collections, NeDB instances, etc. (Hence they can create, store, and share data at the lowest level). They can also communicate by utilizing the same callHook functionality that the core MeshCentral files have. callHook is basically an emitter that checks for the existence of a hook in all the installed plugins, then runs them with whatever parameters or data is included in the call- so this would be an optimal way for plugins to interact with each other. So yes, this type of interactivity is entirely possible.