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

Maintaining a healthy site


This section describes some general tasks that a Configuration Manager administrator should carry out in order to maintain a healthy site. Housekeeping is a very important aspect of the job.

Database indexing

Fragmented indexes cause performance issues with SQL databases, and it gets worse over time. It is crucial to perform regular reindexing of the Configuration Manager database. How will you know if you have excessive fragmentation? Execute the following T-SQL command on your database:

DBCC Showcontig

You can see the results of this command in a test lab shown in the following screenshot. In the lab, there is no issue with fragmentation. However, it's very different in the real world. If the site database is fragmented more than 10 percent, then you need to take action and rebuild the indexes:

You could configure the built-in database reindexing maintenance task. However, in our opinion, this is not the optimal solution. It is more efficient to use a script developed...