How to Get Visibility Control on SCCM Content Over WAN Traffic? Systems management has never been the same since SCCM. SCCM is amazing, but third-party vendors have improved it with better content delivery, P2P, WAN optimization, and more.
Adaptiva has enhanced SCCM features with its Content Visibility and Control features. In your environment, are you capable of seeing where your SCCM content is while it is transferring over the WAN? Can you pause it, reorder them, or speed it up? Can you see where all your SCCM content in the world is on disk at rest?
If not, you can’t know what’s happening, and you are at risk if zero-day updates or mission-critical fixes come up that you must deploy immediately. In this post, I’m going to cover the following topics:-
Can you see all content in transit?
Can you change a content delivery priority in real-time?
You want SCCM traffic not to affect business traffic, but if you need to override, can you?
How much easier would life be if you could pause anything?
See All Content at Rest on Peers Globally
How to Get Visibility Control on SCCM Content Over WAN Traffic Configuration Manager Endpoint Manager?
Can you see all content in transit?
The new Adaptiva OneSite 5.5 makes it so admins can now see all WAN transfers worldwide through the LiveFlow™ feature. Screenshots to show you the technology.
Here you see all the SCCM related WAN transfers going to London. You also see Content ID, Source Office, Destination Office, Source Client, Target Client, Priority, Transferred Data (%), Remaining Data (in KBs), Remaining Time (hh:mm:ss), Avg. Speed, Current Speed, and State. This doesn’t matter if only one office, but if you have multiple offices.
Can you change content delivery priority in real-time?
This screenshot shows content being delivered, one active and two queued. To send time-critical content immediately, change the priority to a higher one. OneSite gives many levels of 255 priorities, not just high, medium, and low. This avoids the problem where the delivered content is already assigned the highest priority, so there is no way to assign new content a higher priority.
See below, just 10 seconds after changing priority. The high-priority content is actively transferred, and the demoted item is waiting.
Automatic pause and resume are other important things to look for. When you make a new top priority, the active item pauses. When the top priority item is done and the transfer is complete, the paused active item continues right where it paused without starting over and wasting time.
Next, you see a screen that makes tracking and managing content priority changes easy.
OneSite lets you immediately re-prioritize content delivery in real-time without killing jobs. When you change priorities, the content you paused automatically resumes after the urgent content completes without starting over. You can specify priority at a finer level than just SCCM’s high, medium and low. It’s easy to view and configure all content priority changes.
You want SCCM traffic to not affect business traffic, but if you need to override, can you?
Adaptiva OneSite predictive bandwidth harvesting keeps your WAN from flooding by sending each packet only, so it never competes with business traffic. But if you ever have a content transfer so important you need to send it ASAP on equal footing with business traffic, you can.
OneSite lets you execute a transport override like in the screenshot above. Even if this rarely happens, better to have it and not use it than to need it and not have it.
How much easier would life be if you could pause anything?
This screenshot shows that OneSite pauses a specific piece of content, which can later be resumed exactly where it left off without missing a byte. This next screenshot is pausing all content deliveries to a specific office with just one command.
Sometimes you want to prevent systems traffic from sending over the WAN at all. The screenshot below shows you what Adaptiva can do with this, nicknamed “Big Red Button.”
To be clear, the screenshots are to show how you can pause content instantly without killing jobs and start it again later without losing progress:
- For delivering a single piece of content
- For all content deliveries to a single office
- For all content deliveries worldwide
See All Content at Rest on Peers Globally – How to Get Visibility Control on SCCM Content Over WAN Traffic
The last screenshot show everywhere in the world where a certain piece of content resides. By choosing an individual office, you can then see the details of which peers are storing it. The view also reveals content that is being transferred or is paused while higher priority content completes transferring.
Resources
SCCM Related Posts Real World Experiences Of SCCM Admins (anoopcnair.com)
Author
Anoop is Microsoft MVP! He is a Solution Architect in enterprise client management with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. E writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc…