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

Log files

For those who have spent any time trying to troubleshoot Configuration Manager, by now they will probably have noticed that there are lots of log files, in fact at last count there are in excess of 360 across clients and servers. The information we find in these log files is also not the most detailed there is available as there are options to enable more verbose logging for deeper troubleshooting requirements. We can find an exhaustive list in the Microsoft TechNet library at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh427342.aspx.

Client log files

In this section, we are going to run through some of the client log files and indicate what we need to be looking at when troubleshooting a Configuration Manager client. Throughout other chapters, we will come back to specific log files and we will look in more detail, so in this chapter we are going to take an overview.

Let us start with the Windows client install files. We can find these by default in %windir%\ccmsetup\Logs and all...