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

Robust backup process


In Configuration Manager 2007, there was only one method to back up and restore your site. You had to configure a built-in maintenance task (Backup Site Server). Configuration Manager 2012 now supports two methods of recovery. You can still use the traditional maintenance task method. However, you can also recover your site from an SQL database backup. This is now the preferred method and has a number of advantages over the maintenance task.

  • The maintenance task backup will copy all of the database data and log files to the backup folder location, whereas you can compress the backup files using the SQL backup. This could lead to a huge saving in disk space.

  • When you use the SQL backup task, you can take advantage of advanced features such as retention periods and integrity checks.

  • The maintenance task backup first stops Configuration Manager Services before copying the database data and log files. This is not the case with the SQL backup, which causes no service downtime...