Need to delete 200,000 software discovery models.

[John Pool]

Reason being is that the scan's on our customers network are finding a custom program that is saving data as registry keys.  Not the smartest move, but we have no ability to get them to change their application so I will just filter them from future discoveries.  However that still leaves a big pile of bad entries that I need gone.

[Tony Chatfield1]

Hi, I would expect that you could run a background or fix script to remove the unwanted records, but first you will need a way of identifying good from bad, either a field value on records that matches good\bad,
or perhaps the 'good' records result in another related record within the platform that can be referenced IE if relationship x exists then the record is good so don't delete, if not the purge and move on to check next record.

[Scott Halverso1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @John Pool 

I'm curious why you need to delete them.  What is your business driver?  200,000 is amazingly huge, I'm working with 172,000 distinct SW Discovery Models, we're bringing in all the personally installed software on 15k+ cell phones, which leads a large share of those SW Discovery Models.

As Tony said you'd need a platform admin to write a glidescript to delete these models.  The script will need logic to identify the software discovery model should be deleted (no software installs?)

I like to save these utility scripts as Fix Scripts in the system so the script is saved to be used again at a future date.  

[Scott Halverso1]

Be aware of the scheduled job called 'SAM - Delete Discovery Models if there are no related Installations' runs once a month.  If you don't have software installs backing those discovery models, this scheduled job will clean up

[John Pool]

To answer the question, it turns out the customer has a home brew program that uses the registry to store system info such as serial number and other system attributes.  This makes 6 unique software instances per machine that are junk.  Because of the way discovery parses out the registry key, they all have the same discovered publisher so I can use that attribute to identify and delete them.  I should also be able to add that publisher as a keyword to avoid creating them in the future