7 min read

In this article by Peter Egerton and Gerry Hampson, the author of the book Troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager you will be able to dive deeper in the troubleshoot Configuration Manager concepts. In order to successfully troubleshoot Configuration Manager, there are a number of tools that are recommended to be always kept in your troubleshooting toolkit. These include a mixture of Microsoft provided tools, third-party tools, and some community developed tools. Best of all is that they are free. As it could be expected with the broad scope of functionality within Configuration Manager, there are also quite a variety of different utilities out there, so we need to know where to use the right tool for the problem. We are going to take a look at some commonly used tools and some not so commonly used ones and see what they do and where we can use them. These are not necessarily the be all and end all, but they will certainly help us get on the way to solving problems and undoubtedly save some time. In this article, we are going to cover the following:

  • Registry editor
  • Group policy tools
  • Log file viewer
  • PowerShell
  • Community tools

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Registry Editor

Also worth a mention is the Registry Editor that is built into Microsoft Windows on both server and client operating systems. Most IT administrators know this as regedit.exe and it is the default tool of choice for making any changes to, or just simply viewing the contents of a registry key or value. Many of the Configuration Manager roles and the clients allow us to make changes to enables features such as extended logging or manually changing policy settings by using the registry to do so. It should be noted that changing the registry is not something that should be taken lightly however, as making incorrect changes can result in creating more problems not just in Configuration Manager but the operating system as a whole. If we stick to the published settings though, we should be fine and this can be a fine tool while troubleshooting oddities and problems in a Configuration Manager environment.

Group Policy Tools

As Configuration Manager is a client management tool, there are certain features and settings on a client such as software updates that may conflict with settings defined in Group Policy. In particular, in larger organizations, it can often be useful to compare and contrast the settings that may conflict between Group Policy and Configuration Manager. Using integrated tools such as Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) and Group Policy Result (gpresult.exe) or the Group Policy management console as part of the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) can help identify where and why clients are not functioning as expected. We can then move forward and amend group policies as and where required using the Group Policy object editor. Used in combination, these tools can prove essential while dealing with Configuration Manager clients in particular.

Log file viewer

Those who have spent any time at all working with Configuration Manager will know that it contains quite a few log files, literally hundreds. We will go through the log files in more detail in the next chapter but we will need to use something to read the logs. We can use something as simple as Notepad and to an extent there are some advantages with using this as it is a no nonsense text reader. Having said that, generally speaking most people want a little more when it comes to reading Configuration Manager logs as they can often be long, complex, and frequently refreshed. We have already seen one example of a log viewer as part of the Configuration Manager Support Center, but Configuration Manager includes its own log file viewer that is tailored to the needs of troubleshooting the product logs. In Configuration Manager 2012 versions, we are provided with CMTrace.exe. The previous versions provided us with Trace32.exe or SMSTrace.exe. They are very similar tools but we will highlight some of the features of CMTrace which is the more modern of the two. To begin with, we can typically find CMTrace in the following locations:

<INSTALL DRIVE>Program FilesMicrosoft Configuration ManagerToolsCMTrace.exe
<INSTALL MEDIA>SMSSETUPTOOLSCMTrace.exe

Those that are running Configuration Manager 2012 R2 and up also have CMTrace available out of the box in WinPE when running Operating System Deployments. We can simply hit F8 if we have command support enabled in the WinPE image and type CMTrace. This can also be added to the later stages of a task sequence when running in the full operating system by copying the file onto the hard disk. The single biggest advantage of using CMTrace over a standard text reader is that it is a tail reader which by default is refreshed every 500 milliseconds or, in others words, it will update the window as new lines are logged in the log file; we also have the functionality to pause the file too. The other functionality of CMTrace is to allow filtering of the log based on certain conditions and there is also a highlight feature which can highlight a whole line in yellow if a word we are looking for is found on the line. The program automatically highlights lines if certain words are found such as error or warning, which is useful but can also be a red herring at times, so this is something to be aware of if we come across logs with these key words. We can also merge log files; this is particularly useful when looking at time critical incidents, as we can analyze data from multiple sources in the order they happened and understand the flow of information between the different components.

PowerShell

PowerShell is here to stay. A phrase often heard recently is Learn PowerShell or learn golf and like it or not you cannot get away from the emphasis on this homemade product from Microsoft. This is evident in just about all the current products, as PowerShell is so deeply embedded. Configuration Manager is no exception to this and although we cannot quite do everything you 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 the machines. PowerShell can be a one-stop shop for our troubleshooting needs if we spend the time to pick up the skills.

Community tools

Finally, as user group community leaders, we couldn’t leave this section out of the troubleshooting toolkit. Configuration Manager has such a great collection of community contributors that have likely to have been through our troubleshooting pain before us and either blog about it, post it on a forum or create a fix for it. There is such an array of free tools out there that people share that we cannot ignore them. Outside of troubleshooting specifically, some of the best add-ons available for Configuration Manager are community contributions whether that be from individuals or businesses. There are so many utilities which are ever evolving and not all will suit your needs, but if we browse the Microsoft TechNet galleries, Codeplex and GitHub, you are sure find a great resource to meet your requirements. Why not get involved with a user group too, in terms of troubleshooting, this is probably one of the best things I personally could recommend. It gives access to a network of people who work on the same product as us and are often using them in the same way, so it is quite likely that someone has seen our problem before and can fast forward us to a solution.

  • Microsoft TechNet Galleries:https://www gallery.technet.microsoft.com/
  • Codeplex: https://www.codeplex.com/
  • GitHub: https://www.github.com/

Summary

In this article, you learned about various troubleshoot Configuration Manager tools such as Registry editor, Group policy tools, Log file viewer, PowerShell, and Community tools.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

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