System Total Uptime

[Ichigo]

Hi Bigfix Community,

I am new to Bigfix and my first assigned task is to use it to analyse the total uptime of individual machines in my organization.

I have done some research and found that windows OS will only show the uptime since last bootup so the value will keep resetting after every reboot/shutdown. My aim is to gather the total uptime of individual machines even after reboots/shutdown. I am thinking if it is possible to get the (windows event log of shutdown 1 - windows event log of bootup 1) + (windows event log of shutdown 2 - windows event log of bootup 2) etc… until i have a total uptime via bigfix.

Please advise.

Thanks in advance!

[JasonWalker]

Are you licensed for Power Management? I think there may be some reports in there. Otherwise, check the C3 offering from @strawgate, I believe he was working on something along those lines.

[Entaille]

is there a reason why you want to record total uptime? you can analyze how long a machine’s been up with simple relevance like

uptime of operating system

you can also automate restarts to ensure machines don’t end up having a lengthy uptime. I find this squashes the problem for the most part.

sorry - I know this isn’t incredibly helpful for what you’re after. Jason gave some good leads on that if you want to pursue it further. I’m confident it’s possible to build out, just haven’t had the need to, personally.

[BigFixNinja]

The following will give you the birthday of the OS install,

systeminfo | find /i “Original”

Are you trying to calculate some sort of mean time to failure calculation based on wear and tear? What is the total amount of time run on the machine going to be used for? Or maybe calculate total power used during its lifetime? Etc?

[Ichigo]

@ JasonWalker - I do not have the power management module What do you mean by “C3 offering”? We might purchase the power management module if I can justify the advantages to my organization.

@ Entaille - It is to calculate hardware failure based on wear and tear. My organization would like to replace these devices once they reach a certain life spend.

@ BigFixNinja - Yes, you are right. Primary usage is for replacement of hardware based on wear and tear (eg: hardware replacement once it reaches 20k hours uptime). Secondary usages are for checking if it has sufficient uptime to allow patching to take place (this is if the relevance allows input of dates in monthly format. Eg: Apr - 12 hours total uptime, May 30 hours total uptime).

[JasonWalker]

C3 is a great collection of community content, curated by @strawgate and hosted on Bigfix.me

C3 Power Management: How to track Computer Usage

Hello! I wanted to drop a note about some new content and a new helper tool in C3 Power Management! Overview What we've made available is a new aggregate usage tracking reporting tool. Power States report on active / idle / standby so we can easily report on: Power Efficiency Computer Usage So not only can we see whether your power policies are working, we can track it by time of day or by location. In addition, you can easily see peak computer usage across a department or location…

C3 - Free BigFix Community Content Libraries

Hello! I am pleased to announce the public availability of C3, a free set of content libraries for use in your environments. This content is provided by my organization, an IBM business partner, and is maintained by me and anyone who contributes to the repositories on github. This is not IBM provided or supported content. Inspiration C3 exists to provide a large collection of content that is general enough to be applicable everywhere but specific enough to solve problems organizations face …

[strawgate]

I’m not aware of any way to get total system uptime across its entire life – I think you may be able to get some useful data from the SMART data on the hard drive but I don’t have information on how to do that.

Bill