A Practical Guide to ConfigMgr Operations

Here is a operations guide sysadmin or operations team can follow to maintain a ConfigMgr environment. The guide is divided in to daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly operation tasks.

In general the tasks described in these documents should be implemented into whatever ticketing system that is being used, such as Service Now, Remedy or Zendesk.

With this post I'm also hoping to get your feedback on common operation tasks that you are doing, so please give feedback in the comments section.

Special thanks to Jordan Benzing (@JordanTheITguy) for providing #shiny ideas and feedback to the first draft of this guide.

Daily Maintenance Tasks

1. Verify that the nightly backup was successful
2. Check free disk space on all volumes on all site systems (use a PowerShell script for that).
3. Check the ConfigMgr database size
4. Check Site Database Status (Monitoring workspace)
5. Check ConfigMgr inboxes for backlogs (again, PowerShell is useful, or simply tools like WinDirStat)
6. Review Windows Event logs on site systems
7. Checking and removing obsolete clients, as well as checking for client errors
8. Check on Content Distribution Report (script or dbjobmgr)
9. Check that ADR’s have run successfully (definitions updates run daily)
10. Backup task sequences and endpoint protection policies (six copies kept)
11. Cleanup old IIS logs so they don't build up
12. Backup custom SCCM Reports
13. Cleanup any systems still in collections with OSD Task Sequence deployments.
14. Cleanup old SCCM Users 60 days after they disappear from Active Directory.

Weekly Maintenance Tasks

1. Review all daily tasks
2. Review and disk space usage on all site systems, and compare to previous week (to see trends)
3. Verify that predefined weekly maintenance tasks scheduled are running successfully
4. Review collection evaluation runtimes
5. Review software updates compliance reports
6. Review client health (again to see trends)
7. Check SQL Maintenance, re-indexing etc.
8. Verify that networks haven’t changed (boundaries etc.)
9. Verify that old IIS Log files have been deleted

Monthly Maintenance

To be added, but these are for preparing for upgrades, and to establish long term trends. Usually scheduled meetings with workplace managers and other team members.

1. Update, test, and deploy OSD reference images. Delete inactive computers accounts.

Quarterly to semi-annual Maintenance Tasks

1. Review the security plan for any needed changes
2. Change accounts and passwords if necessary according to your security plan
3. Review the maintenance schedule for upgrades to the ConfigMgr platform
4. Review the Configuration Manager hierarchy design for any needed changes
5. Check network performance to ensure changes have not been made that affect site operations
6. Review the disaster recovery plan for any needed changes
7. Perform a site recovery according to the disaster recovery plan in a test lab
8. Check hardware for any errors or hardware updates available
9. Check overall health of site

Resources

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend to read up on the maintenance tasks list that Microsoft published as part of the ConfigMgr Docs.

Maintenance tasks for System Center Configuration Manager
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/configmgr/core/servers/manage/maintenance-tasks