System Center Configuration Manager Management Pack

You can find System Center Configuration Manager Management Pack at https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=29267.

This one is not going to be applicable to everyone, but nonetheless I had to include it as a top troubleshooting tool. If you are not familiar with System Center Operations Manager, it is essentially the performance and monitoring tool in the System Center suite. Operations Manager is another Microsoft System Center product that will monitor servers, clients, network devices, and other things such as storage hardware and blade chassis with the use of management packs. This is not intended to be a lesson in Operations Manager, but essentially the management pack contains lots of detailed information about the ins and outs of a given application or service that will automatically discover and analyze the Configuration Manager infrastructure and highlight issues where necessary. This helps a lot not only with reactive scenarios as it can point out exactly where our problems lie, but also in proactive maintenance of our Configuration Manager environment as it can highlight potential failures before they happen and alert us accordingly. Management packs are often developed by the original software developer but there are often third-party versions available and with some experience we can even write our own. With regard to Configuration Manager then, what could be better than a management pack written by Microsoft that contains lots of low-level information about their own product? If this option is available, then it is highly recommended. Following is a summary of the monitoring we can find in the Configuration Manager Management pack:

• Replication health
• Configuration of replication
• Backup and recovery status monitor
• Component availability monitoring
• Service availability
• Server role availability monitoring
• Compliance rate of baseline deployment monitoring
• Discovery backlog monitoring
• General health monitoring
• Database connection monitoring
• Inventory backlog monitoring
• Software metering backlog monitoring
• Software update synchronization status monitoring
• Distribution point configuration monitoring

In addition, the following diagram shows us the monitored components and how they roll up to produce a health state in Operations Manager:

Having this management pack available to us can save so much time, both in the short and long term, when experiencing problems so again this has to go into the top picks for our troubleshooting toolkit.