Q: What's a good way to track the health of my System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 clients?

A: A common question I hear is how to check on the health of the clients in an SCCM 2007 environment. There are two great ways to quickly get a view on the health of your clients. The first comes with SCCM 2007 R2. On the installation media, there's a Client Status Reporting folder. If you open this folder, you'll find CLIENTSTATUSREPORTING.MSI. Run this and it installs a client health monitoring tool that queries the SCCM database for last contact with clients and queries the management points for contact. It even tries to ping clients if they haven't checked in. A help file is included that walks you through the process, but basically, after running the install, you run the configuration tool, and then you import the reports into the configuration manager console. You'll have six additional Client Status reports, as shown.

Below is the Inactive Clients Detail report, which has details about last communications and if clients can be pinged, which can help troubleshoot.

The second option is to use the SCCM Dashboard, which uses Windows SharePoint Services 3 and comes with web parts to show information about SCCM. The dashboard can easily be customized. One of the customizations is for client health reporting, as documented in this MSDN blog, and it's easy to implement. The video below shows how to configure the SCCM client health that walks you through, but below it I've provided the basic web part showing inventory status.

 

There are many other web parts that show things such as actual reasons for failure and obsolete clients.

You can go much further with log viewing, but both of the ways above give great, quick insights into health of the clients.