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


Clients by nature of the product are really the biggest component of Configuration Manager by the typical ratio of clients to site system, so probability says that we are most likely to hit problems in this area. There is a lot of information available from the Configuration Manager client, so choose wisely before jumping in. Using the information provided, isolate the problem and we can extend the logging if we need further information. Once we have narrowed down where the problem lies, use the right tool for the job and check against the standard error codes provided. As with any troubleshooting, we should take a logical approach and, above all, write it down, blog it, or share it, so that next time it comes up we have a head start.

In the next chapter, we will look into the top levels of a Configuration Manager installation by seeing what we can do to troubleshoot hierarchies of sites, the site servers themselves, and the technologies that hold them together.