If you have a large infrastructure with Configuration Manager, you have a lot of power at your disposable. Deploying software to maybe 100.000 computers spreading over different sites and geographical areas.
However, in many cases you will not be alone with that responsibility and everyone once in a while you always have someone that is there to make your work even harder J
And let us presume for one min that someone manages to swipe a software packages on a DP or change it in some way.
It is not easy to check that a file has been altered except if you have audit policies in place but then again you would have to monitor the access.
Also you need some form for compliance to see that the packages are the same on all the DP’s and didn’t suffer from a corruption and are deploying not working packages/applications
This is where Content Validation comes in; Content validation is a feature to check the status of content that has already been distributed on a distribution point.
It will compare the content on the disitribution point is the same as the content in the source of the application or package. If the content is not valid, then it will be reported in the content status node in the monitoring node.
So how to activate Content Validation?
This is done on Distribution Point level under Administration à Servers and Site System Roles à Distribution Point
When you activate this you can watch the smsdpmon.log (To check if any packages report back non-compliant) and if you go into the monitoring pane à Distribution Status à Distribution Point Configurations Status à
In case it is non-compliance you will end up with a log file like this.
Now if you get a non-compliant package, Configuration Manager cannot auto remediate the package, you would have to redistribute the package to the distribution point again.