This seemed to me to be a good excuse to dig into PowerShell, as I had not yet done very much work with it.

The result is a PowerShell script that I am sharing here called SchedulerInsights, details are below. If you find any issues or have any recommendations as to changes, please let me know.

Details/Sample:

1. The script has two parameters:
   • -Log
     • The full path to the schedule.log file you’d like to parse
   • -Data
     • There are two possible values for –Data
       • CurrentJobs
         • 
       • CountsBySite
         • 

<#
.SYNOPSIS
   <SCCM Scheduler Log Insights version 1.5 by Jamie Moyer>
.DESCRIPTION
   <Given a schedule log from an SCCM server, parses and displays the current send requests.  Also, shows the current Job Count and total size of Remaining data to be sent to each site in MBs>
.PARAMETER <Log>
   <Full path to the scheduler.log file you would like to parse>
.PARAMETER <Data>
<Whether you want stats by site or the list of current jobs returned>
.EXAMPLE
    .\SchedulerInsights.ps1 -Log \\SMSServer\c$\SMS\Logs\Schedule.log -Data CurrentJobs
.EXAMPLE
    .\SchedulerInsights.ps1 -Log \\SMSServer\c$\SMS\Logs\Schedule.log -Data CountsBySite
#>

#Get Parameters passed
 param($Log,$Data)

$SchedulerQueue = @{};

function Get-JobData() {
      param ($line)
      $job = New-Object PSObject
      $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name SendRequest -value $line.ToString().Trim().Substring(13, 8).Trim();
      $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name PkgID -value "";
      $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name Version -value "";

      $RegexMatches = ([regex]::matches($line, "\b\w+:[\w\s]+\b(?!:)"))      

      foreach($match in $RegexMatches)
      {
            if($match.Value.contains("JobID")){ $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name JobID -value $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim();continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("DestSite")){ $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name DestSite -value $match.Value.Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim();continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("FinalSite")){ $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name FinalSite -value $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim();continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("State")){$job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name State -value $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim();continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("Status")){ $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name Status -value $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim();continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("size")){ $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name sizeKb -value $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim().TrimEnd('k');continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("Remaining")){ $job | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -name RemainingKb -value $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim().TrimEnd('k');continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("PkgID")){    $job.PkgID = $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim().Substring(0, 8).Trim();continue;}
            if($match.Value.contains("Version")){ $job.Version = $match.Value.ToString().Trim().Split(':')[1].Trim();continue;}
      } 

    #Handle adding only the most recent objects to the hash table
    if ($SchedulerQueue.ContainsKey($job.SendRequest))
    {
            $SchedulerQueue.Remove($job.SendRequest);# //always remove existing entry 
            if ($job.Status.Trim() -ne "Success")
            {
                $SchedulerQueue.Add($job.SendRequest, $job);
            }
    }
    elseif ($job.Status.Trim() -ne "Success")
    {
            $SchedulerQueue.Add($job.SendRequest, $job);
    } 

    return $job;
}

function Get-MostRecentJobData()
{
    $r = new-object system.collections.arraylist;
    foreach($j in $SchedulerQueue.Values)
    {
        [void]$r.Add($j)
    }
    return $r;
}

function Get-SiteCounts
{
  foreach($site in $Input)
  {
    $siteStats = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PsObject
    $siteStats | Add-Member NoteProperty SiteCode $site.Name
    $siteStats | Add-Member NoteProperty JobCount $site.Count
    $siteStats | Add-Member NoteProperty TotalJobSizeMb (($site.Group | Measure-Object -Sum RemainingKb).Sum /1024)
    $siteStats
  }
}

#MAIN
if($Data.contains("CurrentJobs"))
{
    $JobLines = Select-String $Log -pattern "DestSite" | Select-Object Line |ForEach-Object {Get-JobData($_.Line)}|Get-MostRecentJobData|Out-GridView
}
elseif($Data.contains("CountsBySite"))
{
    $JobLines = Select-String $Log -pattern "DestSite" | Select-Object Line |ForEach-Object {Get-JobData($_.Line)}|Get-MostRecentJobData|Group-Object -Property DestSite|Get-SiteCounts | Sort -Desc TotalJobSizeMb | Out-GridView
}

Often times when working with SMS 2003 in advanced security mode the need arises to add computer objects to active directory groups. Normally for a computer account to become aware of the group membership change a reboot is required.  Often it is difficult to arrange for the scheduled downtime necessary to reboot a production server.

I've used the below procedure to update the computer's security token without rebooting.  This does take a bit of effort, but it doesn't involve rebooting your server.

• Download the Klist utility. You'll need to install the .msi package and get klist.exe from the install directory.
• Next you need to launch an interactive command prompt running as the system account

              Click Start -> Run ->  "AT <time> /i cmd.exe" 

• (NOTE:  If you are trying to launch an interactive command prompt via a remote desktop session to your server you will need to be logged on to session 0 to see the command prompt.  You can do this by using the following command when connecting to the server.  "mstsc /console" )
• When command prompt is launched.

               Run "klist purge"

• Run Gpupdate /force

Your computer's security token should now be updated.

Do you routinely troubleshoot issues with SMS clients?  Issues such as WMI not functioning, CCMEXEC not running, Bits issues, etc. The place I always start my troubleshooting is with the client log files (C:\Windows\System32\ccm\logs) as they contain a wealth of information and usually quickly lead you down the road to problem resolution.

In the past I've used simple scripts to parse the log files and that has worked fairly well, I've also fallen victim to manually opening log files one by one (by relevance to the problem I am working on) and looking/searching for keywords like 'failed' or 'error' or searching for a particular PackageID and it's associated entries.  Although this works fine, it is very time consuming and tedious.

An easier way to get the same results:

Recently I've begun using a tool called Log Parser to quickly parse through SMS client log files on both local and remote locations.  The beauty of using log parser is in it's simplicity, it provides query based access to numerous types of data.  For this scenario the data we care about is in the SMS client log files, which it handles with ease.

Parsing SMS client log files on a remote machine and getting results in a datagrid:

1. Open a command prompt and go the the log parser directory (C:\program files\Log Parser 2.2)

2. In the below example I am going to parse all the sms client log files on a remote system (LabExchange2003) and return every instance of the word 'failed' to an easy to navigate datagrid.

a: logparser -o:datagrid -i:TEXTLINE "select * from \\labexchange2003\c$\windows\system32\ccm\logs\*.log where text like '%failed%'"

Notice the results datagrid that is produced, you see the log file name where the match was found and the text. Initially the datagrid shows the first 10 rows, you then have the option to show the next 10 or show all.

Visual Log Parser:

Another option for utilizing log parser is to use Visual Log Parser from SerialCoder.net. This is a front-end to Log Parser that makes searching log files even more user friendly.

Here is a screenshot of the UI and a sample query:

Conclusion:

Log Parser is a very powerful tool, and while this article just touches the surface on it's capabilities I hope it serves as a good primer to help you become familiar with the tool and save you some time.

Future Resources:

Stay tuned to this blog for scripts/ideas around using log parser to assist with troubleshooting sms client & server issues.

Additional Resources:

Visual Log Parser on Codeplex

Great Technet article on using Log Parser

What if everything could be queried with SQL?

Scripting with Log Parser

Another Great Article on Using Log Parser to read log files and using its COM object

Paul Thomsen wrote a great series on analyzing SMS log files using vbscript