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

PowerShell


PowerShell is here to stay. A phrase often heard recently is learn PowerShell or learn golf. Like it or not we cannot get away from the emphasis on this homemade product from Microsoft. This is evident in just about all current products as PowerShell is so deeply embedded. Configuration Manager is no exception to this, and although we cannot quite do everything we can in the console, there are an increasing number of cmdlets becoming available, more than 500 at the time of writing. So the question we may ask is "where does this come into troubleshooting?" Well for the uninitiated in PowerShell maybe it won't be the first tool they turn to but with some experience we can soon find that performing things like WMI queries and typical console tasks can be made quicker and slicker with PowerShell. If we prefer, we can also read log files from PowerShell and make remote changes to machines. PowerShell can be a one-stop shop for our troubleshooting needs if we spend time to pick up the skills.