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

Summary


In summary, our troubleshooting toolkit contains a variety of applications, all of which are free, and many of these tools will not take a great amount of time to get to grips with but will undoubtedly save us time so that is a great trade-off. Also included is something that isn't strictly a tool but can be just as important when trying to solve problems—product knowledge. It goes without saying that if we already understand how the product works, then our troubleshooting will generally be quicker and more successful. There aren't any training courses that will teach us how to deal with the unexpected that can sometimes occur in any software product, so fast-tracking that knowledge gain by getting involved with people in the know seems only logical. It can not only help us get over problems but also avoid them by improving our practices in the product to prevent problems in the future. In the next chapter, we will a look at the log files that underpin the troubleshooting of Configuration Manager and which files we would commonly use during everyday troubleshooting of this, sometimes overwhelming, product.