Monitoring Status and Flow

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SMS 2003 offers an excellent set of tools for monitoring the status and flow of the Site Control Manager process: site status messages and site component log files. Together, these tools provide you the means not only to effectively troubleshoot an SMS process but also to learn the process and become familiar with the way SMS components interact with, and react to, one another.

Status Messages

Each of the SMS components responsible for carrying out the Site Control Manager process generates a set of status messages specific to this process. To view these status messages, expand the System Status object in the SMS Administrator Console, expand Site Status, and then expand your site. Click Component Status to view a list of status messages for all the components, as shown in Figure 3.16. You’ll find entries for Hierarchy Manager and Site Control Manager listed here.

Figure 3.16: The Site Component Status window, listing the general status level for all the SMS components.

To view all the detailed status messages generated for a component, right-click the component, choose Show Messages from the context menu, and then choose All. SMS will display the rich set of detailed messages that that component has generated during a predefined period—by default, since midnight that day. Figures 3-17 and 3-18 show the messages generated by Hierarchy Manager and Site Control Manager, with the content of one message displayed. You can view message content by double-clicking the message or by positioning your cursor on the description area of each message to open a pop-up window. Viewing and configuring status messages are discussed in detail in Chapter 5, “Analysis and Troubleshooting Tools.”

Figure 3.17: Status messages generated by Hierarchy Manager.

Figure 3.18: Status messages generated by Site Control Manager.

Log Files

In addition to status messages, you can configure each component to create and maintain log files. Unlike status messages, which are generated automatically and enabled by default, log files aren’t automatically enabled for the site server in SMS 2003. This is a notable change from earlier versions of SMS. Logging component activity does require an additional expense of resources on the site server. Depending on the SMS 2003 features you installed and the components you have enabled and configured, SMS could generate 30 or more log files— more than twice as many as were generated in SMS 1.2.

Needless to say, it’s not always practical, or even necessary, to enable logging for every SMS component. Logging is intended primarily as a troubleshooting tool. However, you would do well to practice using logging in a test environment to learn how the SMS components interact with one another. Logging is certainly not the most exciting activity you could engage in, but nevertheless this exercise will be enlightening from an SMS perspective.

Enabling SMS 2003 Log Files

You enable SMS 2003 component log files through the SMS Service Manager tool launched in the SMS Administrator Console. Follow these steps to enable SMS 2003 component log files:

1. Expand the Tools object in the SMS Administrator Console.

2. Right-click SMS Service Manager, choose All Tasks from the context menu, and then choose Start SMS Service Manager, as shown in Figure 3.19. SMS launches the SMS Service Manager console. Notice that it makes its own connection to the SMS database.

   
   Figure 3.19: Launching SMS Service Manager console.

3. Expand the site node and highlight Components, as shown in Figure 3.20.

   
   Figure 3.20: The SMS Service Manager console.

4. Right-click the component for which you want to enable logging—for example, SMS_Hierarchy_Manager—and then choose Logging from the context menu to display the SMS Component Logging Control dialog box, as shown in Figure 3.21.

   
   Figure 3.21: The SMS Component Logging Control dialog box for single components.

5. Select the Logging Enabled check box. Note the location and name of the log file that will be created. Modify this entry only if you need to. Note also the default log size of 1 MB. This setting ensures that the log doesn’t compromise disk storage space. Again, you can modify this entry (in MB) if you need to.

6. Click OK and then close the SMS Service Manager console.

Enabling Logging for Multiple Components

Obviously, there’s much more to SMS Service Manager, which we’ll look at more closely in Chapter 5. However, one feature that’s definitely applicable here is the ability to enable logging for multiple SMS components at one time.

You can enable logging for multiple components at one time by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking the components you want to log, just like selecting multiple files in Windows Explorer. You can enable logging for all components by clicking the Component menu in the SMS Service Manager console and then choosing Select All or by right-clicking a component and choosing Select All from the context menu. With all the components selected, you can either right-click any one of them and choose Logging from the context menu or click the Component menu once again, choose Logging, and then enable logging as described earlier.

When you enable logging for multiple SMS components in this way, the option Use Same File For All Selected Components will be selectable in the SMS Component Logging Control dialog box, as shown in Figure 3.22.

Figure 3.22: The SMS Component Logging Control dialog box for multiple components.

Selecting this option will cause the components that you selected to write their logging data to a single file. With more than two or three components, this log file can become confusing and somewhat unwieldy. Nevertheless, for something like the site configuration change process, in which two SMS threads are involved, this file can provide a single source of tracking information.

Log files are text files that are written, by default, to the SMS\Logs folder. You can save these files anywhere you want when you enable logging, but unless you have disk resource concerns, why make changes? You can view log files using any text editor or using the SMS Trace utility. SMS Trace is included as one of several tools for download from the SMS Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/ smserver). The advantage of using SMS Trace is that it displays one or more log files in real time—that is, while they’re being updated. A text editor will display the file only as it appears up to that point in time. For details on how to use SMS Trace effectively, refer to Chapter 5.

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