Identifying, Troubleshooting & Resolving 2300 and 2301 ConfigMgr Distribution Manager status messages with KB978021

Lionel — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:39:00 GMT

Your ConfigMgr sites start to populate with hundreds and thousands of status messages, namely 2300s and 2301s. Hold your horses and do not panic though as Microsoft has addresed this issue with the availability of a patch KB978021 of which more details and the download can be found here. This hotfix also requires that you are at least running System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 and have the distribution point role installed.

For those that are new or have not encountered the issue, here is a systematic way to identify and mitigate the after effects of the issue that may manifest before or after you apply KB978021.

Identifying the problem
We are able to identify it by implementing infrastructure health checks as part of a daily routine on the ConfigMgr Infrastructure by observing the site statuses with the ConfigMgr Status Message Viewer from the ConfigMgr Console. We then highlight sites that are returning very high status messages counts in the SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER component for no apparent reason. When I mean 'no apparent reason', i refer to it that you have not made major changes in the site configurations or done a mega update of any package to any distribution point. Once that have been identified, we can associated the issue with what is mention here by verifying that the bulk of the messages are indeed 2300 and 2301 messages. You will find that the description of the messages will contain a lot of messages about processing, creating or updating packages in your environment. You will also get similiar results by looking at the Distmgr.log found on the server.

Through SQL, running the following against your database will also verify and determine that you are experiencing the issue. We are interested in determining the component counts from the status messages and the highest messageID counts. You should notice the really high count if your site is experiencing the issue big time. :)

SELECT Component, count(*) as StatusMsgCounts from vStatusMessages group by Component
ORDER BY StatusMsgCounts desc

SELECT MessageID, count(*) as MessageIDCounts from vStatusMessages group by MessageID
ORDER BY MessageIDCounts desc

Example outputs

Resolution
Obviously, this is going to cause a strain on your database and the backup of the site as this issue persists. If your backup parition is not large enough, the backup will eventually fail as more and more messages are added into the tables. Therefore, these are some steps you can do to address this issue.

1. Firstly, the most obvious step is to download and apply KB978021 from MS here. This will stop further generation of the status messages.

2. If the messages are causing a strain on the database (space, performance etc), delete the status messages from the "StatusMessages" table in the Configmgr database with the following SQL command. This is one of my preferred ways but it is advisable to do it in batches as mass deletions will take a significant strain on the database as well. Therefore, for example, you can do it in batches of 100,000 etc, depending on how many messages you have. As before, please be careful when doing deletions! You may also want to REBUILD the SQL index to free up the space on the Database.

DELETE TOP(100000) FROM StatusMessages
WHERE (ID & 0x0000FFFF=2300 or ID & 0x0000FFFF=2301) AND component='SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER'

With the above care, you should see the issues gone for good...

Hope this helps provide a step by step analysis of the issue and onto the eventual solution from MS.

Cheers.

Lionel's configmgr blog : Configmgr 2007, kb978021

Identifying, Troubleshooting & Resolving 2300 and 2301 ConfigMgr Distribution Manager status messages with KB978021