Find and fix those unhealthy clients!

While the ConfigMgr product has matured over the years the general category of client health continues to make admins curse.  For those that don’t know what I’m referring to (lucky folks), “client health” generally refers to making sure all the components, drive space, network connectivity, etc. is all in place so ConfigMgr can monitor and change the client machines as you intend.

There are several tools out there which have built to try and identify the myriad of possible causes for a client to go “belly up” on you. I know several companies which have built their own home grown network of scripts and detection logic to do it as well.  Nothing was perfect, however, as I don’t know any common standardization within the ConfigMgr community.  Seeing this some fellow PFE decided to give it a shot and put together a framework to help tackle this issue.  It is available as an offering through Microsoft Premier services, because it does a lot and needs some good understanding to get it setup and use it correctly.  We call it the System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Client Health.

Notice I called it a framework, not a tool.  The folks that built this did so in a way that is very adaptable.  It has within it a set of rules on things to check and determine client problems, but it is done in such a way that every company can adapt it to their needs.  For instance, while one customer might say that a machine with less than 1 GB of free disk space is a problem, others may not care until it gets down to less than 100 MB.

The toolset is still being developed, with more improvements planned, but it can do a lot to help admins today.  The biggest critique I have heard about it is that it is mostly a problem identification framework, and less about remedies.  We do have some sample code for some suggested remedies, but the thought is that many of the folks out there already have remedies for most things, they just don’t know where to apply those remedies.  You could easily apply your remedies to this framework.

I am now accredited to provide this service to customers with Microsoft Premier contracts, and I am excited to start helping folks get this “hurdle” in ConfigMgr under control.  I hope to see it go away, as the old duplicate GUID problem did that once use to haunt us all.

UPDATE 7/3 - Corrected the hyperlink to point to the SCCM 2012 datasheet.

UPDATE 2-12-14 - Link corrected for new datasheet

UPDATE 2/2/2016 - New datasheet link and offering name