We were trying to discover WebSphere 8.5.5 servers in our environment but the JEE MP couldn't find them. The discovery wrote this kind of error to the Windows Log:

The process started at 8:56:25 AM failed to create System.Discovery.Data. Errors found in output:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Monitoring Agent\Agent\Health Service State\Monitoring Host Temporary Files 9\73626\Microsoft.JEE.WebSphere.Install.Discover.vbs(196, 1) Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Object not a collection


 
Command executed:	"C:\Windows\system32\cscript.exe" /nologo "Microsoft.JEE.WebSphere.Install.Discover.vbs" {10FEBF68-F318-4F09-8E6B-4567D66E2559} {014E39AA-B032-13EC-E5F1-3B880E645FFC} ServerName {D7E586A0-5480-9B71-F731-D3F15B3627FD} "8"
Working Directory:	C:\Program Files\Microsoft Monitoring Agent\Agent\Health Service State\Monitoring Host Temporary Files 9\73626\ 

One or more workflows were affected by this.  

Workflow name: Microsoft.JEE.WebSphere.8.Windows.Installation.Discovery 
Instance name: ServerName 
Instance ID: {014E39AA-B032-13EC-E5F1-3B880E645FFC} 
Management group: SOKSCOM2012

I investigated the discovery vbs script and Windows registry and found out that one of the users had empty WebSphere Application Server folder under Software/IBM in Windows registry. This was probably left after uninstallation of WAS. After I removed the empty registry entry then the auto-discovery found WAS instances.

Would it be possible to enhance the discovery vbs script to exclude empty USER/Software/IBM/WebSphere Application Server key folder in the next version?