Finding assets in Chef

TL;DR

 knife search node "manufacturer:Dell* OR manufacturer:HP*" -a fqdn -a dmi.system.manufacturer -a dmi.system.product_name -a dmi.system.serial_number 

Background

Today I was asked if the data center inventory was up to date... Well, no, it wasn't... I was looking for ways to find out what was in the data center without having to make the hour round trip.

I thought, "I wonder what's in Ohai". Low and behold, node[:dmi][:system][:manufacturer] is the name of the hardware manufacturer. WooHoo! A little knife search magic, and I get: 

 knife search node "manufacturer:Dell* OR manufacturer:HP*" -a fqdn -a dmi.system.manufacturer -a dmi.system.product_name -a dmi.system.serial_number

host.mydomain.com:
  dmi.system.manufacturer:  Dell Inc.
  dmi.system.product_name:  PowerEdge R720xd
  dmi.system.serial_number: XX0099AA
  fqdn:                     host.mydomain.com

There it is, a one line asset inventory. This is specifically looking for Dell and HP hardware. It is pretty easy to extend this to any other hardware platform, including virtual guests. If you are using RedHat KVM, you can search "manufacturer:Red*".

There are a few formatting options as well, I tend to like JSON output. So, through in a -Fj and you get nice pretty JSON object.