SCCM WQL Query: Prompting for a Device’s MAC Address

WQL Query: Prompt for a MAC Address

If you want to build a Configuration Manager collection or report that prompts you to enter a specific MAC address at run time — handy for quickly finding or targeting a single machine when you only know its network adapter address — you can build this with a prompted WQL query using Configuration Manager’s built-in parameter syntax.

select distinct SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_R_System.MACAddresses
from SMS_R_System
where SMS_R_System.MACAddresses = ##PRM:SMS_R_System.MACAddresses##

The ##PRM:...## syntax is Configuration Manager’s way of turning a WQL query into an interactive prompt — when you run a report or refresh a collection built on this query, you’ll be asked to type in the MAC address you’re looking for, and it’ll match against any device that has reported that address during hardware inventory. This is handy as a one-off lookup query in Configuration Manager’s own query tool, though if you’re building a permanent collection you’d normally want it scoped more specifically (or built as a temporary/ad-hoc query) rather than left as a standing collection, since a MAC-address-based prompt is inherently a single-point lookup rather than an ongoing membership rule.

Still Current on Configuration Manager 2603 (Updated for 2026)

The ##PRM:...## prompted-query syntax and the SMS_R_System.MACAddresses property are unchanged on Configuration Manager 2603, the current release as of August 2026 — this remains the standard, documented way to build an interactive prompt into a WQL query. One thing worth keeping in mind on multi-NIC devices: MACAddresses is a multi-valued property, so a machine with more than one active network adapter (wired plus Wi-Fi, or a hypervisor host with several virtual NICs) can legitimately match on more than one address, and hardware inventory needs to have actually run recently for a newly-added adapter’s MAC to show up in the results at all.

Resources

• WQL
• query
• our SQL & WQL query library