SCCM Management Points Failing: Fixing the SMS Agent Host Service Issue

If SCCM clients intermittently stop communicating with a Management Point, and certificates on affected clients show as “None” in the software catalog, the root cause can be the SMS Agent Host service on the primary site server quietly stopping and taking the MP down with it.

Symptoms

Reinstalling the management point role temporarily fixes it — clients reconnect and certificates populate correctly — but the problem returns, often the very next day. Digging through MP and client logs typically turns up nothing conclusive, because the actual fault isn’t with the MP configuration itself.

Root cause

In many cases this comes down to Endpoint Protection (or another AV/EDR product) interrupting the SMS Agent Host service during a scheduled scan, because its processes and files haven’t been added to the AV exclusions list. The service gets killed or interrupted mid-operation, which brings the MP down with it until the service is manually restarted.

Fix

Add the SMS Agent Host executable and working directory to your antivirus/Endpoint Protection exclusions — at minimum:

%windir%\CCM\CcmExec.exe
%windir%\CCM

Also worth excluding the SCCM installation directory and content library on the site server itself, since scans hitting large content transfers can cause similar disruption. Once the exclusions are in place and a scan has run without touching those paths, the MP should stay up without the daily drop.

Note: if you were seeing this issue specifically after a WCF 3.0 Windows Update, that update shipping a known-bad patch was a separate contributing cause on some environments — applying Microsoft’s fix for that update alongside the AV exclusion resolved it permanently in that case.