Recently I bumped into an interesting issue with status messages on a Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 site.
The following occurs when trying to run a status message query: an error message is displayed indicating “the status viewer was unable to retrieve the stored queries list from the database”. When closing the initial dialog box 2 more errors are shown and in the end no status messages are displayed at all.
The following screenshots show the exact errors:
We spent quite some time troubleshooting this issue but nothing on the server or any of the logs was pointing into a direction of a possible cause. Turns out that to resolve this issue you need to modify the startup type of the SMS Executive and Component Manager Services. Set the startup type to Delayed Start and then reboot the system after the change.
We tried to get more information from Microsoft Support to better understand the root cause. Apparently what is part of the issue is the way how the Configuration Manager infrastructure was implemented. In this particular case the site server and SQL are installed on one system and the SMS Provider is installed on another remote system. By implementing the delayed start of these services on the site server we ensure all required elements are starting in timely and sequential manner. Bottom line: all other services (eg. SQL) are starting up before the Configuration Manager services.
I hope this saves you some troubleshooting time in the future.
Tim
Note: this blog post was previously also posted on my SCUG blog.
