IT Blues: 2020

01 April 2020

A little note on ADR

Do you really know what Automatic Deployment Rules (ADRs) in ConfigMgr do?

ADRs Do not
First - ADRs do not (directly) deploy updates.
Clients do not know about ADRs, so - if you are troubleshooting an update installation issue on clients, troubleshooting an ADR is not relevant.
Of course you sould validate that an ADR did evaluate successfully and that the update package is successfully distributed to distribution points, but those are not client side issues.

ADRs Do
There are three (3) things an ADRs do:
- Create or update a deployment package (and download updates to the deployment package).
- Create or update an update group.
- Create or update update deployments on that update group.

Updating an ADR does not change or update an update group, its update deployments, or the reference update package.
This only happens at the time where the ADR is evaluated and then only if the criteria specified in the ADR results in a change to the update group.

ADR Troubleshooting

For ADR troubleshooting, there is one log to rule them all: ruleengine.log.

Ruleengine.log is of course on the site server.

This log has everything in it, including details about update downloads.

ADR Tips

- Space your ADR evaluations so they don’t run at the same time (or on top of each other).

This will spread out the load and eliminate the possibility of database and download contention issues.

- Set the available offset time for all deployments to allow forvthe newly downloaded content to get to your distribution points.

- Don’t use the Required attribute unless you absolutely have to in order to control network bandwidth usage. The Required attribute is a lagging, reactive indicator.
If a product is in-scope to be updated by ConfigMgr, be proactive and deploy all possible applicable updates for those products.

- Use the Custom Severity attribute to filter out unwanted updates. Manually set unwanted updates to Low Custom Severity and then include only the other custom severities (None, Moderate, Important, Critical) in the update criteria.

- Decline unwanted updates directly in WSUS manually (or use a script). This has the added benefit of pruning the WSUS update catalog used by clients and ConfigMgr which in turn has many benefits including expiring the updates in ConfigMgr.

Common updates to decline this way includes the following:

- Itanium

- Beta

- Version Next

- Windows 10 versions not in the environment or unsupported

- SharePoint

02 March 2020

SQL Server recommendations White Paper for ConfigMgr

Hello ConfigMgr Administrator !!
How are your ConfigMgr database server doing ?

Do you know if you have the optimal settings and configuration for you ConfigMgr SQL Server installation ?

The SQL Server team has compiled a white paper with recommendations applied specifically for a ConfigMgr SQL Server, seen from a SQL Server perspective.

This is not unknown for most, but the SQL Server Team has just updated the White Paper to version 2.4.
This White Paper is not intended to replace the official guidance from the ConfigMgr product group, but as additional information.

The official ConfigMgr guidance can be found here:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Configuration-Manager-ba55428e

The SQL Server Teams recommendations can be found here:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SQL-recommendations-for-ead4747f

24 February 2020

ConfigMgr Dashboards

As a ConfigMgr administrator, how often have you wished you had a fantastic dashboards, that in a quick glance could show you the health of your environment and different status in beautiful colours (of course - green is the preferred colour ).