Chapter 1. The Configuration Manager Troubleshooting Toolkit

In order to successfully troubleshoot Configuration Manager, there are a number of tools that are recommended to always keep in your troubleshooting toolkit. These include a mixture of Microsoft tools, third-party tools, and some community developed tools. Best of all is that they are free. As 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 through some commonly used tools and some not so commonly used tools, then look at 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 chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager Toolkit
• Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Support Center
• WMI Tools
• Registry Editor
• Group Policy Tools
• CMTrace/Trace32/Notepad
• Error code lists
• PowerShell
• Telnet
• Wireshark
• Operations Manager Management Pack
• Community Tools