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

SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is at the core of Configuration Manager, even more so now than in previous versions of the product. Therefore, it goes without saying that we need to ensure that the database server and services remain healthy at all times in order to keep our Configuration Manager environment running smoothly. We will cover some best practices in a later chapter; however, as usual, it is worthwhile knowing your way around Microsoft SQL Server if you are a Configuration Manager administrator. It should be noted right away that Configuration Manager has a very strict policy on database and instance collation, which should always be set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. Any other collation is not supported and can create unpredictable results in our Configuration Manager installation. To change this, generally would require a reinstallation of SQL Server; there are exceptions but this is usually the easier option. Let us take a look at some of the other common factors that can...