This article will try to answer the following questions:

a. From SMACC Inventory, why could we see a different value for "Agents with this version" and "Total agents"?

b. How we able to determine where those counts are coming from?

An example illustration is shown below

Or here is another illustration:

Snow Inventory 6.x

Snow License Manager 9.x

Snow Management and Configuration Center

Let us take the example of AU_v1_r1 illustrated above.

The Total agents is 2,938

The Agents with this version will mean that, the particular snowagent.config file that is in the SMACC INV is being used by 2,084 machines but what happens to the other remaining 2,938 – 2,084?

That means, the other agents are using a revised snowagent.config file other than what is in the SMACC INV.  This could be perhaps either a simple change on the scanning time, the change on verbosity of the log, exclusion or additional settings removed or changed.

To give you a better visualization, we can demonstrate this using Test environment data for an illustration:

You will see that I have _WIN as my configuration name with the following showing

1 Agents with this version

2 Total agents

Next we can export this configuration file:

If we investigate the content within the configuration file this will give us an idea what it contains. 

Below please note the section highlighted in yellow, (and I will discuss later why this is important), for now just remember the tag <!—READ ME…

As shown below, I have one machine using or being deployed with the config that we have examined:

Agents with this version is 1

So where is the other agent?

The short answer is a different config was added to the config file (of ConfigName _WIN).

We will now interrogate the backend database to illustrate this further and understand the raw data.

To do this, please execute the script below in SQL Management Studio:

Select * from SnowInventory.inv.ClientConfigurationVersion where ConfigName like '%_Win'

NOTE: Please change the like statement %_Win to match the ConfigName that you want to check

Now we can see that the query returned two rows.  That means that we have two different configuration both using _WIN as the configName in the snowagent.config file

Within the ConfigurationXml column, it shows that the second row in the example above is the actual configuration file that we just exported.  It illustrates that only one machine is using that config deployment whereas the other one is using another revised config.

Running the queries below will reveal which Config has different versions (revisions of the Config):

Select * from SnowInventory.inv.ClientConfigurationVersion where ConfigName like '%_Win'

select * from SnowInventory.inv.ClientConfigurationRefCount where ConfigurationDigest in (

0xB19FABFCC6C5DF4ACB67E3B582CEB3F4DCB546BDC1388B92CC24C6F0511A114F,

0xFA1806B9F22CBF1F268B76814AE277F4BDAAE42FBD2F7055A8A17EA90DAFFE02)

select a.ClientId, b.HostName, b.ConfigName, a.ConfigurationDigest from SnowInventory.inv.ClientConfiguration a

join SnowInventory.inv.DataClient b on a.ClientId = b.ClientId where a.ConfigurationDigest in (

0xB19FABFCC6C5DF4ACB67E3B582CEB3F4DCB546BDC1388B92CC24C6F0511A114F,

0xFA1806B9F22CBF1F268B76814AE277F4BDAAE42FBD2F7055A8A17EA90DAFFE02)

NOTE: The ConfigurationDigest would differ in your environment, you will need to change the 'where' clause to filter for the correct values on your environment

In summary we can see that from viewing SMACC INV Configurations the one that is displayed is the config that has the <!—READ Me, which was deployed to machine called HY with ClientID 8.

This also shows that the other config that was revised was deployed to machine called JP which has a ClientID of 6.

In total, we have 2 Agents deployed with a ConfigName of _WIN however, each one has a different version of the config file. 

The "Agents with this version" column is the specific total count for a particular configuration. You will be able to see other configuration (snowagent.config changes) via the back end SQL Database by running a SQL query as illustrated above (under the Analysis section). Please remember that SMACC INV will only show one Configuration.

The "Total agents" column is the total devices that have all the deployed configurations in your environment.  This is why the "Agents with this version" versus "Total agents" count may be different.