Showing Dependent Applications in ConfigMgr 2012 via PowerShell

This week I want to devote a blog post to finding dependent applications. Via the ConfigMgr Console it’s very easy to find the configured Dependencies of an Application, but what if I want to know which applications depend on a specific Application? Via the ConfigMgr Console this is not possible (out-of-the-box), but this doesn’t mean that the information is not accessible. In this blog post I will show where to find this information and I will show a complete script which will show the results in a nice form.

Solution

In WMI there is the class SMS_AppDependenceRelation. This class doesn’t contain any methods, but does contain a few interesting properties. These interesting properties are FromApplicationCIID, FromDeploymentTypeCIID, ToApplicationCIID and ToDeploymentTypeCIID. The properties mainly speak for themselves, they contain the CI IDs of the Applications and Deployment Types that depend on each other. The ConfigMgr Console shows the From-To relations and, in this post, I’m searching for the To-From relations. So to get the Applications that depend on a specific Application(CIID), I use the following code snippet:

$DependentApplications = Get-WmiObject -Class SMS_AppDependenceRelation `
-Namespace root/SMS/site_$($SiteCode) -ComputerName $SiteServer `
-Filter "ToApplicationCIID='$ApplicationCIID'"

Now that I know where to get the information, I need to be able to translate it to something readable. For that I will use the class SMS_ApplicationLatest for the Applications and the class SMS_DeploymentType for the Deployment Types and, in both cases, I locate the property LocalizedDisplayName to get a readable name. So to get, for example, the Application name, I use the following code snippet:

$ApplicationName = (Get-WmiObject -Class SMS_ApplicationLatest `
-Namespace root/SMS/site_$($SiteCode) -ComputerName $SiteServer `
-Filter "CI_ID='$ApplicationCIID'").LocalizedDisplayName

Result

The complete script will show the results of the dependent Applications in a nice form and is available via the TechNet Galleries. The nice thing about the form is that it can also be used as a right-click action. The usage of the script is with the article on the galleries. Please let me know what you think of the script.

>> Available via download here on the TechNet Galleries! <<