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

How a management point works


As always, if we understand the workings of what we are troubleshooting, we will inevitably reach a solution sooner. Being such an important piece of the Configuration Manager architecture, many people may think that the management point is a large and complex piece of software. Large it is not, complex maybe, but I guess that is subjective. The management point is in simple terms a small web application that the clients will contact to receive service location information, policy information, and also send configuration data to. The management point can be configured in either HTTP or HTTPS mode depending on the implementation and management points can be mixed across an environment. It is important to remember that when troubleshooting any management points configured for HTTPS, the role functions in just the same way as an added layer of security. Often people can be overcome with the fact that there are certificates involved and miss the basic functions....