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

System Center Configuration Manager Management Pack

You can find System Center Configuration Manager Management Pack at https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=29267.

This one is not going to be applicable to everyone, but nonetheless I had to include it as a top troubleshooting tool. If you are not familiar with System Center Operations Manager, it is essentially the performance and monitoring tool in the System Center suite. Operations Manager is another Microsoft System Center product that will monitor servers, clients, network devices, and other things such as storage hardware and blade chassis with the use of management packs. This is not intended to be a lesson in Operations Manager, but essentially the management pack contains lots of detailed information about the ins and outs of a given application or service that will automatically discover and analyze the Configuration Manager infrastructure and highlight issues where necessary. This helps a lot not only with reactive scenarios as it can point out exactly where our problems lie, but also in proactive maintenance of our Configuration Manager environment as it can highlight potential failures before they happen and alert us accordingly. Management packs are often developed by the original software developer but there are often third-party versions available and with some experience we can even write our own. With regard to Configuration Manager then, what could be better than a management pack written by Microsoft that contains lots of low-level information about their own product? If this option is available, then it is highly recommended. Following is a summary of the monitoring we can find in the Configuration Manager Management pack:

  • Replication health
  • Configuration of replication
  • Backup and recovery status monitor
  • Component availability monitoring
  • Service availability
  • Server role availability monitoring
  • Compliance rate of baseline deployment monitoring
  • Discovery backlog monitoring
  • General health monitoring
  • Database connection monitoring
  • Inventory backlog monitoring
  • Software metering backlog monitoring
  • Software update synchronization status monitoring
  • Distribution point configuration monitoring

In addition, the following diagram shows us the monitored components and how they roll up to produce a health state in Operations Manager:

System Center Configuration Manager Management Pack

Having this management pack available to us can save so much time, both in the short and long term, when experiencing problems so again this has to go into the top picks for our troubleshooting toolkit.