ConfigMgr Scans - High Bandwidth

[nellsworth101]

Background Information

Sorry for the long post, but I'll try to be as detailed as I can.

We are running ConfigMgr 1710 in our environment which consists of a single Site Server in our HQ datacenter.  Our environment is not huge and has around 500 clients (computers) being managed at this time in about 35 geographically separated sites.   Most of these sites have 10-20 computers, some only a couple each and most are not well-connected to the corporate network.  A few of our smallest sites have only T1 connections back to the corporate network using either MPLS or VPN connections.

We have our scans set to run during the daytime as many of our users have the "habit" of turning their machines off at night.  We are trying to change this, but habits take time to change and many of them don't think about this at the end of the day before going home.

Our daily scans run as follows:

• SUP Scan:  10 AM 
• H/W Inventory:  11AM
• S/W Inventory:  Noon
• S/W Metering:  3PM

We also have our SUP Evaluation/Deployment set to run at 1PM.

Issue

The issue we are seeing now is our slower sites (T1 sites) are seeing large spikes of traffic during the day and sometimes this is swamping their connections.  We have been getting repeated calls about slow connections back to corporate network for other networked applications (Citrix, etc)

Looking at our monitoring stats, we are seeing many machines sending large amounts of data (20-50MB) each day to the SCCM Site Server which is also the MP for our environment.   

I'm not exactly sure which of these scans is causing the most data to be sent back, but we seem to have the largest spikes during the 10 AM hour while the SUP Scans are processing.

Has anyone else seen issues like these and if so, how did you handle them?   I know we are a relatively small shop compared to many others, but I'm hoping someone might have some insight.

Are the scans supposed to generate this much traffic back to the Site Server and is there any way to limit or throttle the traffic coming back so it doesn't overwhelm the links.   We have considered moving them to later in the day, but many of our sites are not 9-5 shops and often run 18-20 hours each day, and we have several things that need to run in the evenings such as backups and other site replication that also requires significant bandwidth.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.  Thanks for you time.

[GarthMJ]

First off it is NOT recommended to set up scanning schedule at a defined time.  HW Inv should be set to a daily simple schedule,  SW Inv. should be turned off or set to a simple schedule every 14 days. SU Scan should be set to a simple schedule every 1-2 days. I'm not sure why you changed the SWM from the default 7 days on a simple schedule. 

Setting a defined time for scanning is doing the exact opposite of limited traffic. Everything should already be a simple schedule, this will help balance the traffic through ou the day (mostly the morning).