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

Troubleshooting Application Management


Application Management is one of the most common tasks carried out by a Configuration Manager administrator. Preparation is the key to success with this feature. Remember, Configuration Manager is just the delivery mechanism. You need to research the software in advance and establish how it should be installed silently. However, despite our best efforts and forward planning, things don't always work out as we hope.

Troubleshooting steps

So what can we do when we encounter an issue? Consider the scenario. You create an application and distribute the content to your Distribution Points (DPs). You then deploy the application to a collection containing test devices. However, the application never installs. This can be daunting. What is the next step?

It's not possible for us to include every possible scenario and error code that you may encounter (use the Error Lookup component of the CMTrace tool for interpreting error codes). We have included high-level...