Exclusion Rules
The Exclusion Rules tab holds the filters that keep noise out of the inventory. Every application a scan reports is checked against the active rules before anything else happens — a match means the application is dropped on the spot and never reaches the Applications view or the Unmatched queue.
Product Discovery ships with roughly a hundred built-in System rules covering four categories of noise: operating-system components (OS), device drivers (Driver), vendor bloatware (Bloatware), and runtimes and update packages (Update). Deliberately not excluded are products organizations commonly track — Microsoft Edge, Teams, OneDrive, and Office stay in the inventory even though Windows ships some of them; if you don't want them, mark them as noise yourself.
The Exclusion Rules tab, showing part of the built-in rule set.
The rules grid
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Enabled | Whether the rule is active. Custom rules toggle individually; System rules only toggle by category (see below). |
| Rule Name | The rule's display name. Rules created by Mark as Noise are named Noise: <application name>. |
| Pattern | The text pattern the rule matches. |
| Match Type | Exact, Wildcard, or Regex. |
| Match Field | The field the pattern is tested against: the product name, the publisher, or the install path. |
| Category | OS, Driver, Bloatware, Update, or Custom. |
| Type | System (built-in, shared) or Custom (created by your organization). |
System rules cannot be edited or deleted — their row shows a dash where Custom rules show Edit and Delete. What you can do is turn a whole category on or off for your organization with the Categories dropdown above the grid: deselecting a category disables all of its rules at once, selecting it re-enables them.
Add a rule
Add Rule opens the Add Exclusion Rule dialog:
The Add Exclusion Rule dialog.
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Rule Name | A name that says what the rule blocks, for example Block HP Support Assistant. |
| Match Type | Exact for a literal, case-insensitive name; Wildcard for glob patterns (*, ?); Regex for a regular expression. |
| Match Field | Product Name, Publisher, or Path. |
| Pattern | The pattern itself, for example *HP Support* (wildcard) or ^KB\d{6,} (regex). |
| Category | Usually Custom; pick one of the noise categories if you are extending them. |
Select Create Rule to save. Editing a custom rule uses the same dialog, plus an Enabled checkbox.
When rules take effect
A new or changed rule applies from the next scan of each workstation onward. Rules are not retroactive: an application that is already in the inventory is not deleted when a rule starts matching it — it stops being refreshed, and after it has been absent from three consecutive scans it is marked inactive and drops out of the active inventory on its own.
Related
- Product Discovery — screen overview and how discovery works.
- Applications — mark an already-inventoried application as noise from its row.
- Unmatched Applications — Mark as Noise from the queue sets the entry's status to Excluded.