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

Hierarchies and Site Servers


Let us start with a quick summary of the hierarchy of Configuration Manager sites. A multiple site hierarchy is now used less and less in implementations due to advancements in Configuration Manager 2012 and current branch versions. This is because site roles and components are becoming more highly available and can be designed in such a way that negates the requirement for multiple sites. The vast majority of sites that are installed now are a single primary site. However, we cannot ignore or exclude the multiple site hierarchies that will exist and how we can troubleshoot such hierarchies. We will not go into the details of why you should or should not have multiple sites—that debate is for another book.

There are three levels in a Configuration Manager hierarchy and in its simplest form it can consist of a Central Administration Site, a Primary Site, and a Secondary Site.

It is quite likely that if we use multiple sites in an organization, then we will have...