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

High Availability


We previously mentioned that Configuration Manager is not a real-time product and a certain amount of downtime can be tolerated in most cases. However, it's also useful to add HA to the solution where possible as this would reduce the risk of having to recover a site using the techniques that we described in this chapter.

It's important to note that we cannot implement fault tolerance for all Configuration Manager roles. This section describes some important roles and highlights whether or not it is possible to introduce HA.

  • Site Server: Main site system role. The Site Server hosts the Configuration Manager components and services. There are no HA options.

  • Site Database Server: hosts the Configuration Manager Site Database. SQL can be installed in a HA cluster.

  • SMS Provider: WMI provider used to access and modify Configuration Manager data. You can install multiple SMS Providers.

  • Management Point: Accepts management data and replies to requests from Configuration Manager clients...