System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (SCDEM)

SCDEM is the newest addition to the MDOP family and it’s a corker!

What does it do?

SCDEM captures all application & OS failures across your enterprise and stores them in one central location, to enable your technicians to track, monitor and pro-actively respond to issues.

This is like a local version of the “Send error report to Microsoft” box you sometimes get when apps crash and hang. While it’s good for MS to have this information, in a larger enterprise it’s more immediately useful for the in-house IT team to have it. This way they can identify error trends and match them up to recent changes they’ve made to the network, desktops, 3rd party software etc-thus quickly identifying, and (hopefully) fixing, the problem.

It also enables you to create a company specific knowledge base of fixes for errors.

Advantages of SCDEM

Increase productivity of users: Once SCDEM has been running for a while, IT will have had a chance to identify and correct the vast majority of common issues. That means that there will be less errors on the desktops and thus less downtime for users. The internal knowledge base will also make it easier for end users to be pro-active and solve their own issues without having to log a ticket with the help desk.

Easy Deployment: Due to it using the standard Windows error reporting system, all it takes to get SCDEM deployed to however many 1000’s of PC’s you have with a single Group Policy in Active Directory-nice huh? 🙂

Advanced Reporting: SCDEM provides many different reports to show which applications crash most, when they crash etc so that IT can make well informed decisions when it comes to patching and fixing.

For anyone who is using SCDEM and having problems, I’ve just found a great whitepaper on Troubleshooting this program. Download here. The Technet blog post is here.

If you head over to this Technet blog, you can see a great video of SCDEM in action-here.