Monitoring Software Distributions

After you distribute software, you can monitor the distribution by using the SMS status system. For example, if you advertise a program to run a virus scan each night at midnight, you might want to check every morning to see if all the clients have run the program. You can see this information at a glance in the main Advertisement Status console item. This console item displays every advertisement and includes status information.

The Package Status summary provides information about each package. You can select a package to see the information about a site-by-site basis. You can also select any site to see information for that package on a distribution point-by-distribution point basis. At any level (package, site, or distribution point), you can view the status messages that were used to create the statistics.

The Advertisement Status summary provides information about each advertisement, and then you can select an advertisement to see the information about a site-by-site basis. At either level (package or site), you can view the status messages that were used to create the statistics displayed in the status summary.

You might want to consider using SMS reports to monitor the status of packages and advertisements. SMS reports return a significant amount of useful status information. You can also use status message queries to directly obtain the status of advertisements or package distributions. You can use such queries in reports, to display status information in a more effective manner.

Note

• You can determine which advertisements are targeted at an individual client by viewing the Advertisements tab in the client Properties dialog box of a client in a collection in the SMS Administrator console.

For More Information

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