How to get "System Information" remotely

Are you a Jamf customer? This is core functionality of Casper Suite.

Because of their security stance, Apple's devices don't offer up much info to other anonymous devices on the same network. IP address (naturally), Generic SNMP and ping responses, NIC hardware MAC, etc...

To get a real response and get info from a Mac, there needs to be something already on it waiting for your request. You could connect to it with Apple's pricey ol' standby, Apple Remote Desktop, which has its own agent already in the OS and its own protocol for communication. You could ssh into the Mac and output whatever info you need, with Macs' existing command line tools like system_profiler and ifconfig. Jamf for their part have their own custom binary that's installed on the Mac, though it is also controlled over ssh.

I hope some of that is helpful for an overview. Provide a bit more info about your situation and goals and we can help further.

This can be done with ARD.

Use the send unix command option:

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType

or

system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType

^^ Or in the same way, if you don't have ARD, you can SSH into a machine from another Mac or even Windows using Putty, and run the same commands to get the info. But again - you're posting this on the JAMF forums, this is a fundamental option within the JSS console.

Last I checked BGinfo was for displaying system info on a desktop of a Windows system. I don't use it anymore so maybe that's some new feature I'm not aware of. If you want something like BGinfo to display system info on the desktop of a Mac then you probably want something like GeekTool. Are you sure BGinfo is what you're talking about?

You can get some very minimal information over bonjour.

# Get OS version. e.g. 10.11 = 15, 10.12 = 16 etc
IPaddress="192.168.0.42"
OSVERS="$(dig @224.0.0.251 -p5353 -x ${IPaddress} | grep "osxvers=" | sed 's|(.*osxvers=)([^"]*)".*|2|')"

# Get Model e.g. iMac12,1
IPaddress="192.168.0.42"
MODEL="$(dig @224.0.0.251 -p5353 -x ${IPaddress} | grep "model=" | sed 's|(.*model=)([^"]*)".*|2|')"