Thursday 11 August 2016

Troubleshooting Application Deployment

With any product, in-depth troubleshooting requires a good understanding of the overall system to know where to look and common things that might go wrong. Configuration Manager 2012 is a large product with many moving parts, so understanding how to troubleshoot effectively comes with experience. The depth of troubleshooting attempted will depend on available time and your experience level with the system.
Log Files
Configuration Manager 2012 provides an extensive set of log files to aid administrators in troubleshooting scenarios. The information provided by the log files is significant, but even more detail is possible if you configure verbose or debug logging Logs in Configuration Manager 2012 are very beneficial for experienced administrators to quickly pinpoint a problem. For beginning administrators, though, the logs may beintimidating. Experience will help increase your comfort level with logs. A few suggestions will
help keep things on track:

◆ Determine which logs to review.
Configuration Manager 2012 processes generally can be broken into processing that happens on the server and processing that happens on the client. The management point is in the middle and can have elements that interact with both the server and the client. The place to start reviewing log information depends on where the processing problem seems to be happening: server side or client side.

S.no
Application Deployment :
Server Side Logs
Application Deployment :
Client Side Logs
1
Distmgr.log
AppIntentEval.log
2
Offermgr.log
App Discovery.log
3
PkgXfrMgr.log
AppEnforce.log
4
Schedule.log
policyAgent.log
5
Sender.log
Execmgr.log
6
Despooler.log
CAS.log
7
Replmgr.log
CTM.log
8

DTS.log

◆ Be patient.
The logging system in Configuration Manager 2012 is extensive, and finding the right log to review at first might be challenging. Many different Configuration Manager 2012 client components are required when trying to process an application deployment. These components pass information back and forth as the work gets done. With experience it becomes easier to know which log to start with, and it’s well worth learning. Never fear though; if it gets too time consuming to dig through the information provided, Microsoft support is just a phone call away.

◆ Watch the time stamp.
Following data in the log files boils down to following the time stamps. As logs update, their time stamps do too. A quick look at which logs have been active recently will help you identify logs that might be good candidates for review after an action is attempted and a failure encountered.

◆ Use CMTrace.
The log files are viewable with Notepad, but it’s definitely not the best environment. The CMTrace utility (formerly known as Trace32) available in Configuration Manager is perfect for viewing Configuration Manager logs—and many other types of text logs as well. Trace includes an error-lookup capability, the ability to filter by keyword or processing thread, the ability to merge log files to view the entire conversation between components (remember the time stamp discussion?), and so on. The utility has been updated for Configuration Manager 2012. 
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