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

Active Directory


Active Directory plays a major part in the successful operation of our Configuration Manager sites, so it is important that we know where the touch points are and how these can affect the smooth running of Configuration Manager. We are not going to dive deep into Active Directory as the borders can get blurry as to where we need to troubleshoot, but let us look at a few of the clear relationships with your Active Directory.

Schema extension

We will first take a brief look at the Active Directory schema extension for Configuration Manager. The purpose of this is to allow Configuration Manager to have information about many Configuration Manager features and components available from contacting their Active Directory, which is a known good source of information. It is not absolutely necessary, but is recommended and is applied in the vast majority of Configuration Manager environments. There are a few ways of applying the schema extension, and the most common is probably the...