Stopping and resuming the ConfigMgr Client Service - Tutorial
A quick tutorial on stopping and resuming the ConfigMgr Client Service in response to an emergency.
The example
Suppose a deployment of the ACMEFinance software has just been advertised to a number of devices across a range of departments using Configuration Manager and you've realized that the extra feature used by the Finance department has not been configured properly and will cause issues preventing the Finance department from doing their work. To make sure that the Finance devices are not affected by the implementation you want to immediately stop the Configuration Manager Client Service on just the Finance devices, until you can sort out the issue with the deployment.
The 1E 1E menu, added to Configuration Manager after the extensions have been installed, is available on Device Collections and individual devices displayed in Configuration Manager. The top two items on the menu let you stop and resume the Configuration Manager Client Service on all the devices within the selected context. 1E will process the request as fast as it can, the most time-consuming part of the process would likely be the safety checks and balances of two-factor authentication and approval.
Selecting the emergency stop from the menu
The following steps show the complete workflow for running the Stop ConfigMgr Client Service action from the 1E menu in the Configuration Manager console:
Selecting the action and authenticating
The user CMUser01 is logged in to the Configuration Manager console. They right-click on the Device Collection they want to target, in this case Finance devices, which has already been configured with the devices where the Configuration Manager Client Service needs to be stopped.
On the context menu, they expand the 1E 1E sub-menu
They then select the Stop ConfigMgr Client Service item from the sub-menu
A dialog will be displayed asking if they really want to run the selected action and how many devices will be affected. They click Yes to continue
With two-factor authentication enabled the user is then be prompted for an authentication code for the instruction with the ID 1
CMUser01 then checks their email for the authentication email which is sent by 1E on requesting an action
Having copied the authentication code they then return to Configuration Manager, paste the code into the dialog and click OK
If the authentication passes, a dialog is then displayed that notifies the user that their reques has been submitted to 1E and how many devices it will be performed on after it has been approved.
Approving the action
The 1E actions triggered from the Configuration Manager console are approved in exactly the same way as any other 1E action.
A 1E approver for the Configuration Manager extensions product pack, in our example the full administrator TCNAdmin01, receives an email asking them to approve the requested action
The Approver can use the link at the bottom of the email to go directly to their 1E Notifications page, or they can browse the 1E Endpoint Troubleshooting and select the Notifications page independently from the email
On the Notifications page they can see the pending Request for action approval. Here they can view details related to the request in order to judge their approval
Once they have made their decision to approve they add a suitable comment and check the I understand approving my request impacts my IT environment checkbox
They can then click the Approve button to approve the request
1E will respond to show them that their Approval has been processed successfully
Viewing the responses
After approval, CMUser01 receives an email telling them that their action has been approved
The email contains a Go to results page button. Clicking on this displays the results page for the approved instruction
The responses page shows the two devices in the Finance devices collection have responded to indicate that the Configuration Manager Client Service has been stopped and disabled
CMUser01 then checks the information for one of the devices. They can see that the device has previously had the DEPARTMENT = Finance coverage tag set in 1E - showing for this device that the Device Collection defined in Configuration Manager corresponds to the finance department tags set using 1E.
Confirming the action has taken place
Going to one of the devices in question and opening the Services panel confirms that this is now the case, as shown in the picture.
After resolving the issue, restarting the Configuration Manager Client Service
Once you've resolved the configuration of the ACMEFinance software for the Finance department you will then want to restart the Configuration Manager Client Service. Doing this follows a similar process to stopping the service in that it involves selecting the menu option from Configuration Manager and then approving the subsequently created action in the 1E Endpoint Troubleshooting.
The picture shows the Resume ConfigMgr Client Service menu item being selected from the context menu for the Finance devices collection and the subsequent confirmation and notification dialogs.
When the Resume ConfigMgr Client Service menu item is selected from the Configuration Manager console an action named Restart and enable the ConfigMgr client service with maximum stagger of 3600 seconds gets added to 1E.
Following the normal approval process the action gets run on the 1E client devices. In the case of this action the time at which the Configuration Manager Client Service is started is subject to a random delay with a maximum of 3600 seconds. This is to prevent the Configuration Manager encountering problems through large numbers of client services attempting to contact it at the same time. This will mean that you may have to wait for an hour for the clients to be available to Configuration Manager again.
The picture shows the answers retrieved for the restart action.
