Support Center SCCM: CMTrace replacement

Hello friends

Hope this post finds you in good health and spirit. In this post we will discuss new SCCM troubleshooting tool – Support Center. So lets begin.

What is Support Center

Support Center is a SCCM troubleshooting tool which can be used to:

1. Create zip file which may have SCCM logs, Client policies, WMI, certificates, registries, dumps and what not. It is very helpful for users as they can collect all the logs at once for troubleshooting.
2. Perform various troubleshooting from single console like checking policies, client cache, checking discovery records, hardware and software inventory etc.
3. Faster upload of large logs in viewer.

Support Center was present as additional download earlier but comes integrated in product since SCCM 1810. You can install it from <Install Directory>\Program Files\Microsoft Configuration Manager\tools\SupportCenter at CAS and Primary server.

Components of Support Center

There are four components of Support Center:

1. Support Center
2. Support Center Viewer
3. Support Center Log File Viewer
4. Support Center OneTrace(Preview)

Support Center – This tool is used to create Zip file and other toubleshooting tasks.

You need to select the type of files you need to collect and then click on Collect selected data.

Client tab provides basic information about client as Client ID, Site code, MP information etc.

You can check actual, requested and default policies from Policy tab.

From Content tab, you can view information about applications and take actions as Install. You can also check cache information from this tab.

Inventory tab is to check inventories as DDR, hardware, software, metering etc.

Troubleshooting tab provides you single click status for various components,

Support Center Viewer – This tool is used to open bundle file created using Support Center. You can also open single log file which it opens in logfile viewer.

Support Center Log File Viewer – This tool is more like CMtrace and is used to open a log file however it is much faster and has more features as decode certificate.

Support Center OneTrace – This is a new log viewer tool introduced in SCCM 1906. Its again like CMTrace but has added functionality as faster loading for large logs, bookmarking logs, checking status message from site server.

So are these tools going to replace CMTrace? I think it will take sometime as on today you can’t use these tools in WinPE since they use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is not present in WinPE. So you still have to use CMTrace in this scenario. Also we have used CMTrace since long so it will take a while for habit to go. Isn’t 🙂

Start using these wonderful tools to make your life easier. You can read more about them here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/support/support-center

So this was all in this blog. I will see you soon with some other technical stuff. And before we end Happy Eid Al- Adha.