Hardware Inventory

For every managed machine, Athena inventories the physical hardware it runs on — the system itself (manufacturer, model, serial number, asset tag, chassis and form factor), whether it is a virtual machine, its processors and core counts, its populated memory slots, and its storage volumes. That gives you a fleet-wide asset and capacity view — which machines are laptops, which are VMs, how much RAM each has and how many slots are still free, which CPUs are in service — without opening a ticket or logging in to each device.

System summary#

The Hardware card summarises the machine as a whole. Each field is populated from what the hardware reports about itself, and shows N/A when a machine or its firmware does not expose that value.

Chassis & form factor#

Every machine reports the standard SMBIOS enclosure code from its firmware, on both Windows and Linux. The Athena server interprets that code itself and records two values: the Chassis — a broad category you can group a fleet by — and the Form Factor — the specific enclosure name. For example, an HP ProBook x360 shows Chassis: Laptop, Form Factor: Convertible.

• Convertibles and detachables are laptops. A fold-back-screen convertible or a detachable-keyboard device has the Laptop chassis, not Tablet; only a pure tablet is a Tablet.
• Several codes. When the firmware reports more than one enclosure code, the first one with a real category wins — a notebook in a docking station reports as a Laptop / Notebook, not a docking station.
• Older agents. If an agent sends only a name and no raw code, the server interprets the name instead; a name it does not recognise is kept as the form factor under the Other chassis.
• Nothing reported. A machine that reports no enclosure at all shows N/A for both fields.

Filtering by chassis#

The chassis values are agent fields, so you can use them anywhere Athena accepts filter fields — collections, tag rules and reports:

Copying identifiers#

The UUID and Serial Number on the Hardware card (and the serial number on the agent Overview) are shown in monospace on a single line, never wrapped mid-value. If the card is narrower than the value, it is cut with an ellipsis — hover it to see the full value in a tooltip, or click the copy button beside it to put the whole value on the clipboard.

Virtual-machine detection#

The Is Virtual Machine flag is inferred from the reported manufacturer and model. Common hypervisor signatures — for example VMware, Hyper-V, QEMU/KVM, Xen, VirtualBox and Parallels — resolve to True. This is a fast, reliable way to separate virtual from physical estate for licensing, capacity or patch-window planning; a machine that reports no recognisable signature is treated as physical.

Processors#

The Processor Details section lists each physical processor package in the machine, so a multi-socket server shows one row per socket:

Memory slots#

The Memory Slots section lists the machine's physical memory slots — both the populated modules (DIMMs) and, where the hardware reports them, the empty slots. That answers the practical upgrade question directly: how much RAM does this machine have, and how many free slots are left to add more?

Storage volumes#

The Storage Devices section lists the machine's logical drives / volumes and how full each one is — the view to reach for when you care about free space rather than the physical drive hardware.

Platform coverage#

Hardware is inventoried on both Windows and Linux endpoints, using each operating system's own native facilities, so a mixed fleet answers the same questions consistently. The exact fields a given machine can populate depend on what its hardware, firmware and drivers expose — anything unavailable simply shows N/A or, for empty memory slots, Empty.

Where to see it#

Open a machine from the Agents list, then in the agent detail view's left-hand navigation choose Hardware for the system summary, or Processor Details, Memory Slots and Storage Devices for the itemised lists.

As with the rest of inventory, the values reflect the machine's last successful collection on its regular reporting cadence rather than a live query at open time. For the wider inventory surface and refresh behaviour, see Inventory.

Auditing across the fleet#

To answer a fleet-wide hardware question — "which machines are virtual?", "which have less than 8 GB of RAM?", "which still have free memory slots?", or "which volumes are nearly full?" — the practical approaches are:

• Read the Hardware and related sections directly on the machines you care about for a quick, targeted check.
• Pull the data over the API or the PowerShell module and filter or export it with your own tooling — the example below flags every machine detected as a VM.
• Run a scan or use a compliance rule to evaluate a hardware condition on the endpoint and surface the result, which you can then use in collections, tagging and reports.

Reading it over the API#

The system summary has a dedicated per-agent endpoint, and the itemised processor, memory-slot and storage-volume lists arrive with the full inventory document.

Reading inventory requires the Helpdesk role or higher. Fields are null (or arrays empty) when a machine has not yet reported that data.

# The dedicated hardware summary for one agent
$headers = @{ Authorization = "Bearer $token" }

Invoke-RestMethod `
  -Uri "https://athena.example.com:8443/api/agents/$agentId/inventory/hardware" `
  -Headers $headers -SkipCertificateCheck |
  Select-Object -ExpandProperty data

# Processors, memory slots and volumes come with the full inventory document
$inv = Invoke-RestMethod `
  -Uri "https://athena.example.com:8443/api/agents/$agentId/inventory" `
  -Headers $headers -SkipCertificateCheck

$inv.data.memorySlots  | Select-Object slot, capacityFormatted, speedMhz, memoryType
$inv.data.storageDevices | Select-Object driveLetter, fileSystem, totalSizeFormatted, freeSpaceFormatted, usagePercent

With the PowerShell module#

The Athena PowerShell module wraps the summary endpoint in Get-AthenaAgentHardware, which accepts an agent from the pipeline. This makes a quick fleet audit a one-liner:

# Hardware summary for one machine
Get-AthenaAgent -Hostname "server01" | Get-AthenaAgentHardware

# Flag every machine detected as a virtual machine
Get-AthenaAgent | ForEach-Object {
    $hw = Get-AthenaAgentHardware -AgentId $_.Id
    [PSCustomObject]@{
        Hostname     = $_.Hostname
        IsVM         = $hw.IsVirtualMachine
        Manufacturer = $hw.Manufacturer
        TotalRam     = $hw.TotalRamFormatted
    }
} | Where-Object IsVM

Reading hardware requires the Helpdesk role or higher, the same as the rest of inventory. For the full inventory surface and the module reference, see Inventory and the PowerShell Module page.