Book Image

Troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager

By : Gerry Hampson, Egerton
Book Image

Troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager

By: Gerry Hampson, Egerton

Overview of this book

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager is the most popular enterprise client management solution in the world with some of the best features available. Troubleshooting this product, however, is not always as simple as you might want, not least getting to know the hundreds of log files and understanding how the various components work. The book starts with discussing the most commonly used tools for troubleshooting the variety of problems that can be seen in Configuration Manager. It then moves to providing a high level view of the available log files, their locations, what they relate to and what they typically contain. Next, we will look at how we can fully utilize and extend all the available information from the console monitoring pane through to the status messages and down into error logging with some further reaches into WMI, SQL, registry and the file structure. You will then learn what the common error codes mean, how to make sense of the less common ones and what they actually mean with respect to Configuration Manager. Further to this, you will pick up widely acknowledged best practices both from a proactive stance when carrying out your daily administrative tasks and also from a reactive position when the green lights start to turn red right down to a complete failure situation. By the end of the book, you will be competent enough to identify and diagnose the root causes of System Center Configuration Manager administration issues and resolving them.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
2
2. Configuration Manager Monitoring Workspace and Log Files
10
Index

Chapter 1. The Configuration Manager Troubleshooting Toolkit

In order to successfully troubleshoot Configuration Manager, there are a number of tools that are recommended to always keep in your troubleshooting toolkit. These include a mixture of Microsoft tools, third-party tools, and some community developed tools. Best of all is that they are free. As could be expected with the broad scope of functionality within Configuration Manager, there are also quite a variety of different utilities out there, so we need to know where to use the right tool for the problem. We are going to take a look through some commonly used tools and some not so commonly used tools, then look at what they do and where we can use them. These are not necessarily the be-all and end-all but they will certainly help us get on the way to solving problems and undoubtedly save some time. In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

  • Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager Toolkit
  • Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Support Center
  • WMI Tools
  • Registry Editor
  • Group Policy Tools
  • CMTrace/Trace32/Notepad
  • Error code lists
  • PowerShell
  • Telnet
  • Wireshark
  • Operations Manager Management Pack
  • Community Tools