You already know how to effectively use the Status Message Viewer to customize status messages and troubleshoot components and site systems. The Status Message Viewer displays messages on a per-component or per-system basis. Sometimes, however, you might need to see all messages of a specific type generated across all the site systems or from several components.
The SMS 2.0 development team, being one step ahead of the rest of us in this thinking, created status message queries as a means of accomplishing just that. In fact, there are nearly seventy existing default queries that may well satisfy most of your message viewing needs. These queries are listed in the Status Message Queries window, shown in Figure 5-33. To display this window, in the SMS Administrator Console, navigate to the System Status folder and expand it, and then highlight the Status Message Queries folder. For example, the query highlighted in Figure 5-33 will generate a list of all SMS clients on which the Hardware Inventory Client Agent was unable to create the Management Information Format (MIF) file needed to report the client's hardware information to the site database. Running this query is certainly easier than scanning for the error status message for every client reporting messages to the Component Status Summarizer.
Figure 5-33. The Status Message Queries window.
Most of these default queries are prompted—meaning that you must provide information such as a site code, the server name, and so on. To execute a status message query, right-click on the query in the Status Message Queries window, and choose Show Messages from the context menu. Any values that need to be resolved will be listed, and you must enter the information or values requested.
You can also create your own status message queries. To do so, follow these steps:
Figure 5-34. The Status Message Query Properties window.
By default, a status message query displays only status messages in its results window, thus all the options on the General tab are unavailable, as shown in Figure 5-35.
Figure 5-35. The General tab of the Query Statement Properties window.
Figure 5-36. The Criterion Properties window.
The new status message query will now be available in the Status Message Queries window. Figure 5-37 shows the results of running our sample query by right-clicking on the sample query and choosing Show Messages from the context menu. Notice that the result of the query is to display the message "This component started" for every component on the site server.
Figure 5-37. The results of running a sample status message query.