Get-ITGuy

Have you ever needed to get a really fast real-time look at if a service is running on a set of servers or workstations? Open CMPivot against a collection, type in your query, and send it. Seconds later you get real-time answers to your query for any online device. Queries for CMPivot run on 42 devices at once, until all devices you're querying have responded.  The last time my organization did server updates, I (and a trusty super awesome coworker) had to verify if a couple of SQL services were running on a small collection of servers. As we were manually checking these one by one, I came up with the idea that it would be incredibly helpful to use CMPivot.  The below query in CMPivot will return all devices where a SERVICE with the name containing SQL is NOT RUNNING and the service's start type is AUTO. In other words, if a service with SQL in the same is supposed to be automatically running and it's not, this query tells us. Service | where Name contains 'sql' ...

What is Client Notification? Client Notification in SCCM is one of the most powerful features of SCCM that most people never know they use on a regular basis. In SCCM 2012 SP1, Client Notification was introduced to help get rid of the S low M oving S oftware name and help get SCCM into the business of real-time actions. Client Notification consists of a Notification Manager, a Notification Server, and a Notification Agent which is part of CCMEXEC on the client. The Notification Agent on the client attempts to initiate communication with the Notification Server (your Management Point aka MP) via TCP on port 10123 and it keeps this “conversation” alive checking in every 15 minutes. If TCP on port 10123 isn’t available, the client fails over to using HTTP/HTTPS on port 80/443 and this communication occurs every 5 minutes. DNS Resolution from the MP to the Client is NOT required, because the client is initiating the communication with the MP. As long as the client can resolve...

What is CMPivot? What are Scripts? Why do I care about either of them? I recently attended MMS 2019 and took a great session from Jason Sandys and Tom Degreef on CMPivot and Run Scripts. They dove deep into the technical aspects of both of these somewhat new "fast channel" features of SCCM. Full disclaimer: I do not know everything and I may occasionally not know as much as you. Test everything you see here on a LAB environment and make sure you fully understand it. If you have any suggestions for improving this post, please feel free to drop a comment and I'll give you some kudos for your edit. Over simplified, CMPivot is a near real-time (not milliseconds, but usually seconds, and definitely no more than a few minutes) way to query information about your systems. You can find out literally anything about any system within your reach. Scripts pairs nicely with CMPivot because it is a real-time way to run scripts against your query results, or just another old col...