SCCM Toolkit Collection Evaluation Viewer CEViewer exe

By this time, you must have downloaded SCCM ToolKit (this is a new updated SCCM tool kit Microsoft published in a new location). Now, this feature is included in the console itself.

ConfigMgr Collection Full Incremental Evaluation Status Summary from Console | SCCM

The toolkit contains some awesome tools that help SCCM admin perform day-to-day activities and troubleshooting with a lot of ease. One of the tools we are going to look into is SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer.

What is SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer (CEViewer.EXE)

Are you looking for a GUI tool that tells you about collection evaluations happening at your primary site? Why are the collections NOT getting updated?

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Normally, we need to look at the colleval.log  and CollEval.box to check whether there is any issue in collection evaluation and some backlog in CollEval.box.

In this post, I will walk through the Collection Evaluation Viewer tool (CEViewer.exe), which is part of the SCCM tool kit.

In ConfigMgr with CAS (hierarchy), Collection Evaluation issues are more complex to troubleshoot. The collection evaluation is always done on the Primary site in your hierarchy. When you update the collection from CAS, it will cause more delays in collection updates.

The collection Evaluation Viewer (CEViewer.exe) can only connect to the primary server. Do you know how many types of collection evaluation queues are there in ConfigMgr SCCM? You can get answers to all your questions below.

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Some other SCCM 2012 Tool Kit related Blog Posts:-

How to Launch SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer

  1. Launch CEViewer.exe. Connect to the primary site and SQL server.
Collection Evaluation Viewer
SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer Connect

Start Using SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer

2. Full Evaluation Tab in CEViewer.exe Lists the detailed information about all full collection evaluations that happened in the past.

Site Code = PRI, Total Run Time of Collection 00:00:50 and Total Collection= 13

It also provides the following details the Collection Name. The Site ID is Collection ID (So, don’t get confused with Site ID).

It also displays, How much time the collection took to complete the evaluation process. It will give answers to the following questions:- How to find out the last collection evaluation completion time? How to find out the next collection Evaluation Time?

How do we find a number of member changes during the collection evaluation for a specific collection? How to find the last member change time for a collection?

Collection Evaluation Viewer Full Evaluation
SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer Full Evaluation

SCCM Collection Incremental Evaluation

3. Incremental Evaluation tab in CEViewer.exe lists the detailed information about all incremental collection evaluations that happened in the past.

This tab provides all the information about the Incremental Evaluation of collection and answers to all the questions about the collection.

Site Code = PRI, Total Run Time of Collection 00:00:50 and Total Collection= 13

It provides the Collection Name; the Site ID is Collection ID (So, don’t get confused with Site ID).

It also displays, How much time the collection took to complete the evaluation process. It will give answers to the following questions:- How to find out the last collection evaluation completion time? How to find out the next collection Evaluation Time?

How do we find a number of member changes during the collection evaluation for a specific collection? How to find the last member change time for a collection?

Collection Evaluation Incremental Evaluation
SCCM Collection Evaluation Incremental Evaluation

All Queues CEViewer.exe

4. All Queues tab in CEViewer.exe provides details about all collection evaluation queues pending processing. In my example, you can see Full Evaluation collection queues. This Summarizes the current collection evaluations for all four queues.

On the right-hand side, you can see a list of collections in each section a) Manual Update b) New Collections c) Full Evaluation, and d) Incremental Evaluation.

On left hand side : – You can see the Summery of collections –> Collection Numbers (Coll #) and Queue Length (Q. Len) of each collection. Full Evaluation – Coll # = 2 Queue Length  = 1.

Running Evaluation:-  Started on which collections. How many seconds elapsed. For example, you can see the “Software Testing” collection.

Collection Evaluation Viewer All Queue Full Eval
SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer All Queue Full Eval

SCCM Manual Queue option of CEViewer.exe

5. Manual Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provides manual Collection Evaluation Queues pending to be processed. Lists the detailed information about the current collection evaluation in the manual queue.

Some more details like Collection Name, Collection ID (Site ID), Estimated Completion Time, and Estimated Run Time.

Collection Evaluation Manual Queue
SCCM Collection Evaluation Manual Queue

What is New Queue tab CEViewer.exe

6. New Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provides the list of new collection evaluation queues.

List of collections currently in the queue to get processed for NEW Collection evaluation. This also provides Site ID (Collection ID), Estimated Completion Time, and Estimated Run Time of new collections. I know it’s difficult to see the “Test Collection“.

Collection Evaluation New Queue
SCCM Collection Evaluation New Queue

Full Queue Tab CEViewer.exe

7. Full Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provides a list of pending collections for FULL Collection EVALUATION.

List of collections currently in the queue to get processed for FULL collection evaluation. This also provides Site ID (Collection ID), Estimated Completion Time, and Estimated Run Time of new collections. I know it’s difficult to see the “OSD Collection” and “Software Testing“.

Collection Evaluation Viewer FULL EVAL QUEUE
SCCM Collection Evaluation Viewer FULL EVAL QUEUE

SCCM Incremental Queue – CEViewer.exe

8. Incremental Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provides a full list of collections pending for Incremental evaluation update.

List of collections currently in the queue to get processed for Incremental collection evaluation. This also provides Site ID (Collection ID), Estimated Completion Time, and Estimated Run Time of new collections. I know it’s difficult to see the “All Users and Groups, All User Groups, etc…“.

You can click on the REFRESH button to get the latest update on collection evaluation queues.

Collection Evaluation Viewer Incremental Queue
Collection Evaluation Viewer Incremental Queue

9. You can click on the REFRESH button to get the latest update on collection evaluation queues. Also, make use of the STOP AUTO REFRESH option.

Collection Evaluation Viewer Refresh
Collection Evaluation Viewer Refresh

Author

Anoop C Nair is Microsoft MVP! He is a Device Management Admin with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is Blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. He writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc.

12 thoughts on “SCCM Toolkit Collection Evaluation Viewer CEViewer exe”

  1. Great post Anoop! Do you know if this only works for Config Mgr 2012 R2? We’re only on SP1 CU2 and want to be able to use the Collection Evaluation Viewer without having to upgrade to R2 if possible.

    Reply
  2. Once you disable the incremental refresh on a collection , it should no longer show up in the viewer. The colleval.log shows I have 77 collections currently performing incremental evaluations yet this tool continues to show even the old collections that have since been disabled. I have yet to find a supported way to clear the incremental evaluation time in the DB for those collections.

    Reply
    • Hi Steve ! – It should automatically reflect in the database once we disable the incremental refresh/update on a collection (no need of any manual intervention). I’ve checked and confirmed the same in SQL DB. But not very sure why this is not getting reflected in the tool. Have you tried close and relaunch the tool ?
      Regards
      Anoop

      Reply
  3. I have installed the viewer on three different SCCM 2012 R2 sites and the viewer behaves the same way on all three. Once you enable incremental update on a collection, it still shows up in the viewer after disabling incremental even though I can see the status change in the collection database table.

    Reply
  4. I have the same issue, I removed “incremental updates” from ~100 collections a week ago but they still show up under “Incremental Evaluation”. “Last evaluaton time” is of course old, but the totals in the top right is wrong, so I have to manually copy out the data that is still relevant into excel to check total run time 🙂

    I guess it is using some kind of cache that is never cleaned up?

    Reply
  5. I am getting an error when connecting to primary servers in any of the sites. The Error says “The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.” All the certificates on the primary server where the tool is installed as well as a laptop were issued by the domain CA and is in the trusted publishers list.
    How can I find which certificate this tool is trying to use?
    How can I run the tool without needing a certificate?
    Thanks,

    Reply

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