After imporving JiMetrics yesterday so it tries to determine if the host is a VM or not, I made another improvement today: collecting host server BIOS related information and serial number.
I don’t know about you, in the past when I needed to gather a Windows server’s BIOS or serial number for troubleshooting, I typically rebooted the machine, pressed whatever function key was necessary to get into the BIOS, and coped things down. Wouldn’t it be nice if we can get it programmatically and store that somewhere for easy reference?
So today I made another enhancement to JiMetrics to address that need. Here is what I did:
- Added additional columns to the Windows.Host table: SMBIOSVersion, BIOSReleaseDate, SerialNumber;
- I made improvement to the PowerShell script, so it now uses Win32_BIOS to gather and store that in the JiMetrics database.
Together with HardwareVendor and HardwareModel, it will be easy to find the latest BIOS software for your server host. In addition, based on SMBIOSVersion and BIOSRealeaseDate, you can determine if your BIOS is out of date and decide if you want to update the host BIOS accordingly. Based on my past experience, a lot of companies have servers whose BIOS is way out of date. Armed with this information, they won’t be.
With this improvement, it is even more easier for system admins to be on top of things. JiMetrics is not just for SQL Server DBAs, a Windows admin will also find it extremely valuable. What are you waiting for? Go to jimetrics.com and get it 🙂