Find SCCM Applications without Deployments

In this post, I will show you how to find SCCM applications without deployments. SCCM’s built-in Management Insights feature offers a much more efficient and reliable way to identify outdated applications with no deployments or references.

Using a SQL query is another way to determine the applications that haven’t been deployed in SCCM. However, running a SQL query may require a significant number of resources and time to obtain results. Hence, using management insights is a preferred solution here.

Configuration Manager comes with pre-installed management insights which can help you gain a quick overview of your environment. The management insights are a great advantage to ConfigMgr administrators, as they save a lot of time.

Applications without deployments or references

This management insight rule lists all the applications in your environment that do not have active deployments or references. The references here include dependencies, task sequences, and virtual environments. Evaluating this rule allows you to find and delete unused applications, which simplifies the list of applications displayed in the console.

Why should you delete unused applications in SCCM?

One of the best practices that every organization should implement is to remove old, unused applications from the SCCM setup. Old versions of applications can take up a significant amount of disk space, and if you have multiple remote distribution points, a copy of these applications is stored on each of them. Moreover, removing the old applications may also save you from a cybercriminal attack

When there are multiple applications in SCCM, it is difficult to manually check each application to determine if it is actively deployed. Hence, I recommend using the management insights rule to determine the applications that are old and can be removed. Once you have a list of such applications ready, you can use the following guide to delete an application from SCCM.

Find SCCM Applications without Deployments

Let’s look at how to find SCCM applications without deployments using management insights.

• Launch the SCCM console.
• Go to Administration\Overview\Management Insights.
• Select All Insights and expand the “Applications” insight group.
• Right-click the insight rule “Applications without deployments or references” and select Evaluate.

After you run the above insight rule, it lists all the applications that are not deployed or do not have any references. You may notice that the same application has different versions or that multiple applications have different names.

Note: If you have evaluated this rule previously, you must re-evaluate the rule again to find the applications without deployments. This gives you a real-time data about the unused applications.

In the screenshot below, you can see that the insights rule has determined several applications that are old and haven’t been deployed to any user collections or device collections. When you click the Review Actions button, you will be taken to the Applications node in the console, where you can manage your unused applications.