Book Image

Troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager

By : Gerry Hampson
Book Image

Troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager

By: Gerry Hampson

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 (16 chapters)
Troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Configuration Manager Monitoring Workspace and Log Files
Index

Chapter 2. Configuration Manager Monitoring Workspace and Log Files

Key to troubleshooting any problem is information; if we do not have good information, how are we going to figure out what went wrong? We have all seen those comedy error messages that say something like an error has occurred and they just do not help the situation. Fortunately for us, Configuration Manager has really good status and error logging, which, for people who are new to the product, can often be off putting due to the level of detail. Even though the amount and level of detail of the log files can sometimes be overwhelming, it really is a matter of learning to read them and picking out that key piece of information that unlocks the mystery of the enigma. So with this in mind, this chapter sets out to help us in understanding the monitoring workspace in the Configuration Manager console and the log files, where they are, which one to use, and what they contain.