Use boundary groups in Configuration Manager to logically organize related network locations (boundaries) to make it easier to manage your infrastructure. You must Assign boundaries to boundary groups before using the boundary group.
Clients use a boundary group for:
- Automatic site assignment
- To find a site system server that can provide a service, including:
- Distribution points for content location
- Software update points
- State migration points
- Preferred management points
- Cloud management gateway (starting in version 1902)
Boundary group caching was introduced with the first version of Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) Current Branch (CB): version 1511. For more information about boundary group caching and how it works, please read https://home.configmgrftw.com/boundary-group-caching-and-missing-boundaries-in-configmgr/
If you have configured the boundaries and assigned this boundaries to boundary group with site system roles,the client will store this information in its WMI namespace root\ccm\LocationServices with class object BoundaryGroupCache.
If a client is in scope of boundary by any means like AD site, IP subnet or IP address range but not added to boundary group, then client will not have any boundary group cache info in WMI.
In my previous blog post, i talked about how to find the missing boundaries using SSRS report and troubleshooting based on boundary group caching . For more information, please read here
In this blog post, i am bringing another SSRS report for you to find out the boundary group and its assignment details for the client device based on the its last inventory boundary group caching information.
Knowing client boundary group details is important for troubleshooting purpose.With this, you can quickly search what is the client boundary group and what boundaries are added in it.
This blog assumes that, you have extended hardware inventory as per Jason blog post and clients sent the hardware inventory details successfully.
What if you don't want to extend custom hardware inventory changes, but you still need to find out the clients that are missing from boundary groups? Well, you can do that by compliance baseline My next blog post will be based on CI/CB.
Now that you have extended the custom hardware inventory changes and you have the following SQL view created with data in it.
--To see the boundary group cache data of clients (top 10 rows)
select top 10 * From v_GS_BOUNDARYGROUPCACHE bgc
As you can see above, there are clients that have 2 boundary group ID's which means, the client is part of 2 boundary groups. There could be more than 2 as well based on how you configure boundary groups in your infra.
Now,if you want to use this information and create a report to find client boundary group assignment details, we need to convert these multi value to single row.
Jason blog post has STRING_SPLIT function is available only under compatibility level 130 (SQL server 2016 and above).
My lab is running on SQL server 2014 and the string_split do not work. What other methods i have to convert the values to rows?
Other approach is to use XML Method with CROSS APPLY to split your Comma Separated Data :
Following is the SQL code that does the job.
SELECT distinct A.ResourceID,REPLACE((Split.a.value('.', 'NVARCHAR(MAX)')),' ','') GroupID FROM (
SELECT bgc1.ResourceID,CAST('<X>'+REPLACE(bgc1.BoundaryGroupIDs0, ',', '</X><X>')+'</X>' AS XML) AS String from v_GS_BOUNDARYGROUPCACHE bgc
) AS A CROSS APPLY String.nodes('/X') AS Split(a)
The above SQL code works on SQL edition 2014 and above.Anything lower than 2014 have not tested but it should work.
we now have complete info of client details with its boundary group ID's.
we will now use this boundary group ID and join with other SQL views to get the information that we needed.
I have used the following SQL views to fetch the relevant info.
vSMS_BoundaryGroupSiteSystems: store boundary group site system information
vSMS_BoundaryGroup: Store boundary group details
vSMS_BoundaryGroupMembers: Store boundary information.
You can download the SQL views documentation from https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCCM-Configmgr-2012-R2-SQL-5fefdd3b.
After spending quite amount of time, I can finally make some nice SSRS report like below.
All you need is to key in computer name in the prompt and it will fetch the data for you based on its last successful hardware inventory.
You have both inventory of client and client boundary group assignment details.
you can download the report from Technet Gallery, upload to your SSRS reports, change the data source and run it.
In the next blog post, we will see how to create compliance baseline to check client boundary group details.
Thanks for reading the post.
If you have any ideas on custom reporting, please leave them in comment section.