Customizing ConfigMgr Admin Console – Add Details tab to Content Status

When your ConfigMgr environment has many distribution points and packages, you might want to monitor your content compliance status to ensure everything is consistent. This is especially true after the content validation task is run.

You might also have a situation whereby distribution points are offline for maintenance; hence content distribution fails on those distribution points. This could be a big issue if you were pushing a time sensitive deployment with no fall back to alternative distribution points.

Content Status Monitoring (Out of the box)

The Default Content Distribution status monitoring only shows completion statistics (success, in progress or failed), however it does not directly tell you which content failed to distribute to which distribution point. You can of course find this info, but you must do the following steps:

• Select the Content you wish to check
• Click View details
• Click Back to Overview/Content Status
• Choose another
• Click View details. Etc, etc.

Repeating these steps for each package to determine if they have real issues or just flagged as having issues due to the DP being offline can be a long and boring process.

Solving the issue

Using the SCCM Console builder, I have customized the Admin Console to solve this issue. Below you will see that I have added a “Details” tab for content distribution status. The tab provides a more direct view of content compliance state of each distribution point.

There are many posts about how to use SCCM Admin Builder, here is an example which has great information on the process:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/matt_hinsons_manageability_blog/2013/08/21/using-configmgr-2012-console-builder-create-custom-console-nodes/

How to make Details tab for Content Status:

1. IMPORTANT: SCCM Console builder doesn’t have save function.
2. Backup the ConsoleRoot folder which located at %ConfigMgrInstallPath%\AdminConsole\XmlStorage
   
3. Close ConfigMgr Admin console
4. Run %ConfigMgrInstallPath%\AdminConsole\bin\AdminUI.ConsoleBuilder.exe as administrator
5. Choose File – Open – ConnectedConsole
   
   
   
6. Click Monitoring – Content Status – Queries, click on SELECT * FROM SMS_ObjectContentExtraInfo, then click on Detail Panel
7. In TabPage Title, use Summary as Display Name (ref)
   
   
   
8. Click Add TabPage, use Details as DisplayName (ref)
   
9. Check Run Query on this Tab checkbox, then click Configure
   
   
   
10. In Query Settings, choose classes SMS_PackageStatusDistPointsSummarizer
11. Choose those properties that you wish to be seen by default. Example:
    

     LastCopied, PackageID, ServerNALPath, State, SummaryDate

12. Create a new query, right click on Root – New
    
    
    
13. In General – Query area, input:

    SELECT * FROM SMS_PackageStatusDistPointsSummarizer WHERE PackageID='##SUB:PackageID##'

    Choose WQL as Query language, then click OK

    

14. Close the SCCM Console Builder
    

It’s done. Now open ConfigMgr Admin Console again, you will have your Details tab for Content Status view.

Thanks for Reading

I hope you enjoyed this post and can now leverage the Console Builder to customize your ConfigMgr Admin Console to your liking. Changes you made won’t preserve after console upgrades, so if you have any other ideas on how to improve the ConfigMgr Admin Console, please add your idea to the ConfigMgr uservoice and let’s make Admin Console better!