Friday, 5 December 2014

SCCM 2007 - Update Logs - Basic Guide

Generally, if you're troubleshooting a problem with SCCM Software Update Deployments the logs located in %WINDIR%\System32\CCM\Logs folder or %WINDIR%\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs will be a good place to start your hunt for answers. There's a whole bunch of different logs which relate to Windows Update on the client side, these are the ones i've found to be the most useful:
WindowsUpdate.log
(this can be found in the %windir% folder)
The catch-all, one stop(ish) shop for troubleshooting windows update deployment issues. Although it won't always provide you with all the required info when troubleshooting a given issue, it should always be the first port of call when troubleshooting an update issue. It basically acts a simplified roll up of all the other Windows Update logs.
 
UpdatesStore.log
This will trundle off to SCCM and check the SUP to compare all available updates against those which it knows to already be installed on the box. It shows you what happens during the compliance scan cycle. Below you can see the cycle has found a number of updates which are already installed (green) and a number which are missing (red):
 


UpdatesHandler
Here you can watch information about software update compliance scanning and about the download and installation of software updates on the client. It mirrors the information that appears in the WUAHandler. Here is an example of what the UpdatesHandler.log records after new updates have been found. First the updates are downloaded (blue), then the update job moves from preparing to run to being ready (orange), then the updates begin to install (green)


 
 
WUAHandler
This displays all the info gleaned from the Windows Update Agent on the client. This is a good place to watch the whole progress of the download process as seen through the eyes of WUA. Below is an example of the process working to download two required updates, first the log records the start of the initial search (green), then it records the updates it has found (blue) and then it records the installaiton of the updates (blue).
 
 

 
UpdatesHandler.log vs WUAHandler.log
These log files are very similar in that they both provide a window into the download and update process. They provide different slants on very similar information but it's normally worth having both open since they provide different levels of detail/insight into the update process. In the below example, both log files are recording the installation of 5 updates:  
 



How this translates on the user side:
The UpdatesHandler.log and WUAHandler.log files are both mirrors of the more friendly progress reports which pop up in the “Software Update Installation Progress” box which pops up in the user’s task bar. Here you can see how the two logs progress reports directly translate into the SUIP dialogue box:
 

 

 


No comments:

Post a Comment