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

Chapter 8. Disaster Recovery

A book on Configuration Manager troubleshooting would not be complete without reference to Disaster Recovery (DR). What do you do when all else fails? Many administrators will never have to recover Configuration Manager in this way. However, they must be prepared for the worst-case scenario. It's a very important aspect of our job.

So what is DR? In simple terms, it is the ability to recover a service from catastrophic failure in the least possible time with minimal data loss. A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), sometimes known as a Business Continuity Plan, documents the procedures and policies required to recover services. You (or one of your team) are responsible for the Configuration Manager DRP.

So what has to be done? What does DR mean in relation to Configuration Manager? Infrastructures vary across organizations. Some have large environments with a Central Administration Site and several Primary Sites. Recovery techniques for these organizations may differ...