SCCM Status messages viewer blank

February 13, 2016

Configuration Manager Status Messages viewer blank

Sometimes in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) an issue crops up where the fix is not obvious. The ones that the natural logs and console checks won’t spell out what is the issue. Today I want to share an issue which falls into that category where a customer had a problem the Configuration Manager status messages viewer which was giving no results.

Note: If you did not want to read more about the steps I took to fix this issue and just want the fix

Written by

17th Oct 2016

The case of the blank Status Messages viewer

Let’s have a look at the problem in hand:

Navigate to Monitoring / System Status / Status Message Queries
On the query All Status Messages, Show Messages was selected and the date and time for today.
After the query ran, the results were blank:

I looked at the log SMSProv.log for any issues running the SQL queries to find status messages. A couple of errors appeared for example:

ERROR>: CSspQueryForObject::ConvertWBEMTimeToDBTime invalid wbemtime

This error made it look like there could be an issue with WMI. WMI was checked and was seemingly having no issues, so this was not the case.

I could also see that the SQL query was executing correctly from the log file against the SQL Database. The SQL query is as follows:

Select all SMS_Query.QueryKey,SMS_Query.Name,SMS_Query.WQL.Comments from Queries AS SMS_Query where SMS_Query.Architecture = N’SMS_Status Message’

It was confirmed that status messages were coming thick and fast into the environment after looking at statmgr.log (Statmgr.log records the writing of all status messages to the database).

What do we know so far: Messages are flowing, and SQL queries can run correctly, but the messages are not processing.

It was time to check the Inboxes to see what is happening to all these state messages. The Inbox is where the gold mine was found. Under \<PrimarySite>SMS_<Sitecode>inboxesstatmgr.boxretry there were 47,344 items waiting to retry.

The last status message in the retry box was from 28/07/2016 almost two months before troubleshooting this issue. The site had not processed status messages for two months.

The Fix

After the discovery as shown above it was evident our issue here was that the messages were not processing. Luckily this was an easy fix. This is what I did: