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

Get it right at the start


We've often attended customer sites where the Configuration Manager environment is performing poorly or has many issues. In many cases, the correct decisions were not made at the design stage. It's really difficult to recover from this, so it's vitally important to get it right from the start. We've included two of the main design errors that we see on a regular basis.

Hierarchy

It's very simple. There are very few reasons to deploy a Central Administration Site (CAS) unless you are managing a huge number of clients.

What is a CAS?

A CAS is the highest possible site server in a hierarchy. It is an optional component and is only required when you need to deploy multiple Primary Sites. The Primary Sites will be child sites of the CAS and will report their data to the CAS on a schedule.

Features of a CAS are as follows:

  • Administration and reporting for the hierarchy

  • You cannot assign clients to the CAS

  • Does not process client data

  • Does not support all site system roles

  • Data...