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

Troubleshoot Operating System Deployment


Operating System Deployment (OSD) is a very commonly used feature of Configuration Manager. It provides administrators with the necessary tools to create operating system images that can be deployed to computers. OSD troubleshooting can be a complicated process. There are so many different components and technologies working together to provide the solution:

  • Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK)

  • Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) (replacement for AIK)

  • Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)

  • Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

  • TCP/IP Networking

Network installation of OS images is a very popular deployment method. It leverages Windows Deployment Services and ADK to provide a Pre-Execution environment, which allows for remote deployment of Windows images. Technicians press F12 to initiate the deployment. It's very common to use the concept of Unknown Computers to support bare metal deployments. When you enable unknown computer support, any unknown computer...