SCCM and Powershell – Invoke Baseline evaluation on client

Here’s a quick post about how to invoke/trigger evaluation for a baseline on a client remotely.

It follows the same principal as invoking any evaluation in SCCM through WMI classes. I talked about it a little bit in my previous post SCCM and Powershell! adding nodes to a collection and trigger evaluation and if you want to trigger just the evaluation for deployments or hardware inventory etc you can do that.

But for this post i would just like to show a powershell function that i  called Invoke-BLEvaluation which invokes Baseline evaluation, either all of them or specific ones as long as you know their name.

If you want to do this against a collection in ConfigMgr you can find out how here

function Invoke-BLEvaluation
{
 param (
 [String][Parameter(Mandatory=$true, Position=1)] $ComputerName,
 [String][Parameter(Mandatory=$False, Position=2)] $BLName
 )
 If ($BLName -eq $Null)
{
 $Baselines = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $ComputerName -Namespace root\ccm\dcm -Class SMS_DesiredConfiguration
}
 Else
{
 $Baselines = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $ComputerName -Namespace root\ccm\dcm -Class SMS_DesiredConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -like $BLName}
}

$Baselines | % {

 ([wmiclass]"\\$ComputerName\root\ccm\dcm:SMS_DesiredConfiguration").TriggerEvaluation($_.Name, $_.Version) 

}

}

Call Example for a specific computer called SD010 and baseline called “Important Baseline for Servicedesk”

Invoke-BLEvaluation -ComputerName SD010 -BLName "Important Baseline for Servicedesk"

And when you run it it will appear like this

Or if you just want to call all of the baselines deployed to the computer you can ignore the -BLName parameter like this

Invoke-BLEvaluation -ComputerName SD010

It will look something like this when its ran successfully from the ISE and since i have 3 baselines for this machine deployed it will invoke them one by one

UPDATE 21/7/2017

A few people have reported in the comments that they saw issues when trying to run the script and just got an error code like this

“Exception calling “TriggerEvaluation” : “”
At line:3 char:2
+ ([wmiclass]”\\$ComputerName\root\ccm\dcm:SMS_DesiredConfiguration”).TriggerEval …
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : WMIMethodException “

And as Bob Young pointed out in the comments it looks like thats because the property IsMachineTarget = False

Sadly there’s like zero documentation from Microsoft about the class SMS_DesiredConfiguration but after some investigation and testing I found that IsMachineTarget seems to be set by this setting on

the configuration item “Run Scripts by using the logged on user credentials”

When this setting is checked the IsMachineTarget = False and when its not checked its IsMachineTarget = True

So by the looks of things if you want to have this setting checked you cant trigger the evaluation with this script and that’s because on how the WMI method handles request, apparently its different when it runs under user context.

Until next time,

Cheers Timmy