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

Out of band service point


Out of band management of devices, or in other words management of devices that are switched off, requires the use of the out of band service point. This role was deprecated at the introduction of Configuration Manager version 1511. We will, however, cover this as there will still be lots of people using older versions and specifically with this role installed. There are some prerequisites to using this role, however; for those that do use it, it can be very beneficial to an all-round client management approach. In order to use this role, the devices to be managed must contain Intel V-Pro chips and a version of the Intel Active Management Technology (AMT). The role is very light on the server and requires the use of certificates, so as usual all standard troubleshooting applies when dealing with certificates, because these can often expire without notice and the solution stops functioning.

Troubleshooting in the console

From the console, we can obviously install...