Help with 'Reporting' in Patch Manager

Greetings Matt.

There is no canned report in Patch Manager that provides this information, but it is a question we see from time to time, and it's something that can be done. It involves modifying a Managed Computer Inventory task to capture the registry value on the client systems that contains the LastLoggedIn user, and then generating a report from the System Information (Registry) report category.

In fact, we've seen it often enough that we wrote a collection of Knowledge Base articles describing how to it. :-)

How to find the last logged-on user for a managed computer

How to collect managed clients' Registry information

How to configure Inventory tasks to populate Patch Manager reports

To access the data in a report, run the Basic Registry Information report from the Computer (Registry Information) report category, and filter on the appropriate values in the "Registry Value" column. (E.g. on Win2000/XP/2003 systems filter on "DefaultUserName" and "DefaultDomainName" and for Vista and newer systems filter on "LastLoggedOnUser".)

Thanks for the help.

There is a step that doesn't seem to apply when I configure the scheduled inventory task. The highlighted step doesn't show up. Since I can't select a template, it seems like I just rescheduled the default Inventory task, but this time it only has 'Registry' selected instead of almost all of the other options. I can't find a way to delete this new schedule, either. Is any of this related to the fact that I am running on the newest release of Patch Manager; are the provided instructions related to the older version of Patch Manager?

There does appear to have been a change in behavior introduced into the product at some recent point. Historically, selecting "Schedule Inventory" would launch the "Inventory Configuration Wizard" to allow you to select or configure a template for that particular inventory task.

To customize the default template, or create a new template, select "Inventory Configuration" in Step #3, instead of "Schedule Inventory", and then launch "Schedule Inventory" which will create the inventory task using the most recently selected options in the "Inventory Configuration Editor".

To delete the newly created (erroneous) event, go to the Scheduled Tasks node, sort by the "Created" column, and your newly created task should be at the top of the list with the current date.

For referrence:

To access the data in a report, run the Basic Registry Information report from the Computer (Registry Information) report category, and filter on the appropriate values in the "Registry Value"  "Registry Object Name" column. (E.g. on Win2000/XP/2003 systems filter on "DefaultUserName" and "DefaultDomainName" and for Vista and newer systems filter on "LastLoggedOnUser".)