WSUS Troubleshooting

A useful set of tools that I ran across when working on a WSUS problem are available on Microsoft's website.  They provide utilities for the server and client to troubleshoot each individually and report back results for basic functionality tests.  You can check out the site here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/bb466192.aspx

Most of the time it is enough to just run the client tool and it will give you an indication as to where the update is failing.  Downloading the utility you can double click to run it.  Here is an example output of what the utility produces.

Here you can see that two areas failed when checking out the client.  The last setting is clear that the WSUS isn't even configured on this client.  This would mean that instead of policy the client is dependent on the settings under the Automatic Updates tab to direct it for Windows Updates.  We can also see here though that the first setting which failed shows that the Automatic Updates options are turned off as well.  Browsing through the output though you can see that there are other options that will alert you too different settings either being disabled or not functioning properly.  The server utility produces the same type of output only based on server (WSUS) settings instead of the client.  I would recommended that anyone dealing with WSUS and updates always use a seperate well labeled policy just for WSUS and updates.  This way it is easier to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.  You should never make this part of the default domain policy because it just leads to trouble down the road when attempting to diagnose whats wrong.