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


Hopefully, this chapter helped you to understand the different levels of logging and status checking available to us in Configuration Manager. They scale from high-level charts in the console monitoring workspace for the uninitiated or first timer through to the deep low-level logs that can take some time to trawl through. As a general rule, it is recommended to always work through those quick and easy checks and then drill down into the relevant log file afterward. Once we become familiar with the log files, we can then jump straight in and use the various tools listed in Chapter 1, The Configuration Manager Troubleshooting Toolkit, to figure out what is going on. It would be impossible to list every available error message in this book, so it is advised that we use the standard lists from Chapter 1, The Configuration Manager Troubleshooting Toolkit, and hit the Web. Try not to get side-tracked by other interpretations and keep the approach logical. It may surely take some time...