SCCM 2012 - DDM.BOX Millions of DDRs

If you have thousands or even millions of records in the inboxes\auth\ddm.box folder your SCCM is suffering from DDR backlogs.

Usually this is caused by some corrupted record or/and too aggressive Discovery Methods.

There are a few symptoms of DDRs backlogs:

• AD group membership doesn't work properly
• Some computer records don't have all information (i.e. AD site, IP Address, etc)
• You can't browse to the inboxes\auth\ddm.box folder through Explorer
• Some computers don't show up in the SCCM console

Your inboxes\auth\ddm.box folder should be clean like the one below:

To count the number of DDRs, open powershell as administrator, browse to the ddm.box folder and type:

(Get-ChildItem).count

Note that depending on the number of items it can take several hours to complete.

In average SCCM process 1 DDR per second so as an example if you have 5 million DDRs it can take 2 months to process all of them (considering you disable all discovery methods!!)

I imagine you can't wait 2 months, can you?

That's how you fix it:

1. Adjust your Discovery Methods to a more realistic interval. You can leave the delta discoveries to 5 minutes but your full discoveries shouldn't be less than 7 days. If you need to decrease to less than 7 days, make sure you have the horse power for this and keep an eye in the ddm.box folder.
2. Browse to the SCCM folder\bin\X64 and open compmgr.exe.
3. Enter the site server name.
4. Expand Components, click on SMS_EXECUTIVE and in the right pane right click the SMS_EXECUTIVE and click on Query.
   
5. Right click it again and click on Stop.
   
6. Now from a command prompt or powershell go to the inboxes\auth folder and type:

ren ddm.box ddm.old

7. Go back to the Configuration Manager Service Manager and start SMS_EXECUTIVE.

Now SCCM will recreate the ddm.box folder and everything should start working as expected.