SCOM Trick 52 – Agent in pending management

When you look in SCOM Administration and go to device management and pending management you might see some machines listed there. This can have several reasons.
– You might have the SCOM security settings set in a way that manually installed agents need to be approved by a SCOM admin first. In this case you can either approve the agents you like on a regular basis or change the security settings for it to automatically accept or deny all manually installed agents.
– You might have been doing a repair of an agent through the SCOM administration pane (mostly the agent managed view) and the repair went wrong or stalled somewhere in the process. In that case you could run the task again from this view or reject it and try again. Or use some other form of repairing that agent.
– You might have done a cumulative update on SCOM, which requires updates of agents. If agents have been pushed from the SCOM console in the past they will remain manageable through SCOM and once you do an upgrade of the management server to a higher CU level which contains an agent update all those manageable agents will show up in pending management stating they need an agent update. You can approve this action from this view. In some cases there is something that prevents this from working correctly for a handful of machines for any reason (turned off, firewall, rights, wmi broken) and they will stay in pending management. Could be that you will have to repair them or update those few through some other way (script/sccm/manually).
– In most cases the view will tell you in what pending state they actually are (agent update/approval/repair currently running/repair gone wrong or whatever wording is used). Take action based on the what state they are in. In many cases if it is not related to install approval or update approval there might be something wrong on the agent machine or something to do with rights/connectivity/wmi/firewall and so on and it is best to check on the agent machine what is going on.
OpsMgr 2007: Agents stuck in Pending Management with Event ID 21016:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/smsandmom/archive/2008/03/13/opsmgr-2007-agents-stuck-in-pending-management-with-event-id-21016.aspx
As far as I have understood from the SCOM 2012 version, they want to include more information on failed agent installs and those kind of things in the screen, so you have a better understanding of what is happening there.
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