When a managed desktop (virtual or physical) is added to a managed desktop group, the Provision Networks Data Collector Service must be installed to allow the managed desktop to communicate properly with Provision Networks Connection Brokers. The process that accomplishes this is called the Initialize Computer task and is one of the responsibilities of the Connection Broker.

This Initialize Computer task is very important. When it does not complete successfully the connect broker will consider the desktop unusable and mark it as “offline”, thus making it unavailable to users. The failure to successfully complete the Initialize Computer task can have lots of different causes. Some of the common causes are:

• Firewalls that are blocking the communications between the Connection Broker and the Managed Desktop (read this post for all the ports used in these communications)
• Name resolution issues (the Managed desktop can not resolve the name of the Connection Broker or vice versa)
• Insufficient privileges held on the Managed Desktop. These privileges boil down to being able to connect to the administrator file shares (C$, D$, etc) and the privilege to create a service on the Managed Desktop. A local admin typically has these privileges. The account used here is the “Computer Administrative Account” that is set in the properties of the Computer Group.

Depending on where the cause of the computer initialization failure lies, it might help to enable debug logging. We already showed you how to enable logging on the Connection Broker. You can also enable logging on the Managed Desktop itself. To enable logging, do the following.

• In the registry on the Managed Desktop, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Provision Networks\Provision-IT
• Create a new “String Value” with the name “DCServerLog” (case sensitive) and a value of “C:\DCserverlog.txt”.
• Next restart the Provision Networks Data Collector Service. Either open a command prompt and type net stop pndcsvc followed by net start pndcsvc or, alternatively, use service.msc to restart the service.

After the service has been restarted you will find a file in the root on the C:\ drive called “DCServerlog.txt” that holds all the logging for the Provision Networks Data Collector Service. This log has all the information you will ever need to troubleshoot Provision Networks Data Collector Service issues.

It is important to note that this logging is recommended only for troubleshooting purposes and should be disabled in production environments, when possible.