Introduction:
Boundaries for SCCM define network locations on your intranet that can contain devices that you want to manage. Boundary groups are logical groups of boundaries that you configure. For more information click here
Few days ago ,Jason Sandy’s has blogged about boundary group caching and missing boundaries ,more details ,read through https://home.configmgrftw.com/boundary-group-caching-and-missing-boundaries-in-configmgr .
This is one of the highly needed solution that everyone must implement in their environment to evaluate what is their accuracy of the boundaries /boundary groups defined. Boundaries play major role for site assignment and content download. If you do not define the boundaries correctly,client will not function as expected hence it take up lot of your time to troubleshoot and identify it is because of missing boundaries and it is recurring issue.
Jason has covered most of the part about missing boundaries,Boundary group caching ,wmi location and basic SQL query . In this blog post, i am going to show you how to get list of the clients devices that are missing in the boundaries/boundary groups using SSRS Report and troubleshoot these devices. Sometimes You may see something like ‘waiting for content download forever’ in software center and this is because of boundaries/boundary group are missing .
This blog post will help you to identify such client devices with its basic inventory information like OS,hardware inventory ,software update scan,IP address, last reboot etc.
You can also use other methods to achieve this solution using Compliance Item/baseline but HINV method will give you more information and better reporting .
How to create report/upload report ?
Before you download the report ,please make the necessary changes as per the guideline from Jason Sandy's post.
Following are quick points to implement the changes:
1.Open SCCM console ,go to client settings, edit default client settings ,hardware inventory ,set classes,add,choose the wmi namespace and add ,once the boundary group cache added ,uncheck it from default settings and click ok. For more information ,how to add custom inventory ,you can refer guide here
2.Go to your custom client agent settings (if you have ,else you can make these changes in default client settings)
,hardware inventory ,set classes ,choose the class name that we added in default client agent settings.
3.Monitor dataldr.log to see if these changes are processing and view are created in SQL database (v_GS_BOUNDARYGROUPCACHE).
Once you are done with above steps ,download the SSRS report from Technet Gallary ,upload to your SCCM reports ,change the data source and run it.
Report will display the following information. This report is created with filter Client0='1' .I do not want to display the client information that do not have SCCM client .
How to troubleshoot these missing boundaries that are displayed in report:
1. From the report, we see that ,it has one device with its IP address . So we can go back to SCCM console ,look at under boundaries if the this IP address is part of the specified boundaries or not (it is ALWAYS recommended go with IP address range while defining the boundaries unless you have any specific reason not to use it) .
2.Make sure the client device has sent the inventory report successfully after you have made changes in the HINV and they are deployed to collection.
3.If the IP address is defined in boundaries ,check for boundary group ,if it is not ,add to boundary group with site system role .
4.If the IP address is part of boundaries and boundary group .what else can cause the client device appear in this report ?
5. If boundaries and boundary groups are added correctly ,MP must have returned the list of the distribution points that are configured in boundary groups for client to pick for content download.
6.If all above points looks ok ,would suggest to take a look at the client device logs (clientlocation.log ,locationservices.log and ContentTransferManager.log that will help you to identify the DP details.
Happy troubleshooting!