Most of the System Center products are pretty complex beasts. That’s not to say that they’re not incredibly useful; they are. However, because there are so many ways that the tools can interact with other elements, making sure that something completed in the way expected can sometimes be a challenge. Fortunately, Microsoft has added some features to the tool that ease this burden a bit and which helps administrators discover where things are and are not working as expected.
When you open the VMM 2012 console, you can go to the Jobs wunderbar. This area displays all of the jobs that are running or that have recently run. On this page, you will also see three tabs at the bottom of the window – Summary, Details and Change Tracking.
Summary
The Summary tab provides exacting information that lets you know exactly why a job failed. Here, you can see that VMM shows you the specific error that occurred and provides you with some guidance as to how to correct the issue. Between the error details and the recommended action information, a VMM administrator can more easily track down what’s going on with the operation that failed. The figure below gives you a look at the Summary tab.
Details
In the figure below, you can see that VMM \provides you with a step-by-step look at exactly what each job is doing and where a job fails; if a job fails, the step that failed is marked with a red X. This makes the life of the administrator much easier when it comes to troubleshooting issues.
Change Tracking
Changes are the number one reason that IT departments suffer issues. So, VMM 2012’s change tracking feature is particularly handy as it provides administrators with before and after looks of the environment., In the figure below, you can see that the act of setting the virtual machine library actually changes a number of items. Whereas the items in the “Previous Value” column are all shown as “None,” there are actual values in the “New Value” column. This is because the job was intended to add a new resource that did not exist before, so there was no value to change.
