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

The Monitoring workspace


In Configuration Manager there are three levels of status checking on a sliding scale: from overview to part-detail and then finally detailed. The overview parts are the visual indicators in the console that consist of pie charts or high-level indicators that show distribution status, deployment status, and so on. The part-detailed are status message queries and the detailed are the log files. First of all, we are going to look at the monitoring workspace and see what we can use in there to help us with our troubleshooting.

Alerts

While working from top to bottom in the monitoring workspace, the first thing we come across is Alerts. This can give us easy wins to common problems and, even better, we can set up e-mail subscriptions to notify us without being in the console.

Note

In Configuration Manager 2012 without a service pack, we can only set e-mail subscriptions for Endpoint Protection alerts. In subsequent releases, SP1, R2 and current branch, we can add further...