System Center Configuration Manager 2007 : Available Reports and Use Cases (part 3) - Client Status Reporting

4. Client Status Reporting

The effectiveness of your ConfigMgr-based solutions is highly dependent on the client deployment coverage and the health of the ConfigMgr client components on your managed systems. All releases of ConfigMgr 2007 provide a variety of reports that use client inventory, discovery, and status message data to report on client operations and functionality. ConfigMgr 2007 R2 includes a new client status reporting (CSR) application, which gathers additional data from the management point and the clients themselves to provide enhanced client status reporting capabilities. The next sections look at how you can use both the standard reporting capabilities and the new features of R2 to help manage client operations and detect problems with client functioning.

Using Standard ConfigMgr Reports for Client Management

You can use many of the reports in the Client Information and Discovery and Inventory report categories to track your client deployment and management operations and help troubleshoot problems with potential or existing clients.

The SMS Site – Client Information report category includes a number of reports that can help you plan and manage the client deployment at your sites. Here are some particularly useful reports for planning purposes:

• Computers assigned but not installed for a particular site

• Computers with a specific SMS client version

• Clients incapable of native mode communication

• Summary information of clients capable of native mode communication

• Computers with out of band management controllers

Some of the reports specifically designed to help you monitor the status of client deployment operations include the following:

• Client Deployment Failure

• Client Deployment Success

• Client Deployment Status Details

• Client Assignment Status Details

• Client Assignment Detailed Status

• Summary information of clients in native mode

• Status of client out of band management provisioning

• Issues by incidence summary

• Issues by incidence detail for a specified site

The Issues by incidence reports show issues reported by clients that connect to fallback status points due to problems communicating with the ConfigMgr site.

The SMS Site – Discovery and Inventory report category includes several reports that you can use to identify problems with existing clients. These reports include the following:

• Computers not discovered recently (in a specified number of days)

• Computers not inventoried recently (in a specified number of days)

• Clients that have not reported recently (in a specified number of days)

• Computers that may share the same SMS Unique ID

Client Status Reporting in Configuration Manager 2007 R2

ConfigMgr 2007 R2 includes a new set of client status reporting tools for adding in-depth data about client status and health to the site database for reporting purposes. In addition to leveraging existing site data, R2 client status reporting pulls data from management points and directly from the clients. Client status reporting uses the following mechanisms to gather this data:

• Client Pulse— The CSR service connects to the management point, gathers management point logs, and extracts client policy request events. Clients normally request policy from their default management point at regular intervals, every hour by default.

• Client Ping— The CSR service attempts to ping inactive clients to determine whether the client’s name resolves successfully and the client responds to an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) echo request. The service then attempts to connect to the client to check the status of the ConfigMgr client service and the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). Client ping requires that the clients are configured to respond to ping requests and the CSR service account has administrator rights on the client to connect to the service control manager. Internet-based client management does not support client ping.

To use client status reporting, you must set up a client status reporting point for your ConfigMgr site. The client status reporting point system must be running Windows XP SP 2 or higher, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 SP 2 or higher, or Windows Server 2008 (other than Core), with the .NET Framework 2.0 installed. ConfigMgr supports all editions of these operating systems except home editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The client status reporting point does not require the ConfigMgr executive service and therefore is not required to be a ConfigMgr site system. Unlike site system roles, you do not configure the client status reporting point through the ConfigMgr console. Instead, you run ClientStatusReporting.msi from the Client Status Reporting folder of the ConfigMgr 2007 R2 installation media. The Installation Wizard is straightforward and only requires you to accept the license agreement and specify the client status reporting installation path. The Installer package creates a Microsoft ConfigMgr 2007 R2 Client Status Reporting program group with links to the configuration utility and the documentation. To configure client status reporting, perform the following steps:

1.	Launch Configure Client Status Reporting from the Microsoft ConfigMgr 2007 R2 Client Status Reporting program group.
2.	On the Site Setting tab, specify the site database server, database name, and the client status reporting service logon account. Figure 13 shows the Configure Client Status Reporting Site Settings tab. Figure 13. The Configure Client Status Reporting Site Settings tab In this example, the CSR tools are installed on the management point server, and the service runs under the local system account, which has administrative access. If the CSR service does not have administrative access on the management point, you need to perform additional steps to configure the management point to support client pulse functionality as described in the CSR documentation in the ConfigMgr help file.
3.	On the Configure Client Status Reporting Options tab, select the intervals after which you will consider a client inactive if the site has not received discovery data, inventory, status messages, or policy requests from the client. The default interval is 7 days for each type of client activity. Figure 14 shows the Options tab. Figure 14. The Configure Client Status Reporting Options tab
4.	On the Configure Client Status Schedule tab, specify whether to use client pulse and client ping and the schedule for these actions. You can schedule each of these actions for specific days of the week and specify the time of day for the action to occur. You can also use this tab to specify whether the client status reporting point is for the local site only or for the entire hierarchy. Figure 15 shows the Schedule tab. Figure 15. The Configure Client Status Reporting Schedule tab