[21h2] 21H2 - WUFB working, log analytics not. Census issues

[KK20]

I have a couple of test rooms set up for WUFB with a view to killing WSUS in september. WUFB is working fine insofar as the updating side goes, the machines are updating nicely. Even a test non 21H2 upgraded to 21H2 without being prompted.

 

What I am having issues with is the log analytics for about three quarters of the systems. These will not appear in log analytics at all. All the machines are hybrid joined, I used the MS script to get the ball rolling for WUFB. This is the log portion with the error:

 

2022-08-04T10:17:02 : Info : Start: RunCensus
2022-08-04T10:17:02 : Info : Setting property: FullSync to value 1 at registry key path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Census to turn on Census FullSync mode
2022-08-04T10:17:02 : Info : Running C:\WINDOWS\system32\devicecensus.exe
2022-08-04T10:17:02 : Error : ErrorCode 51 : RunCensus failed with unexpected exception HResult: -2146233087 ExceptionMessage: Cannot bind parameter 'Date' to the target. Exception setting "Date": "Cannot convert null to type "System.DateTime"."

 

any ideas? My googlefu has failed on this one.

Edited August 17, 2022 by ZeroHour

[KK20]

OK, I got a lead from someone else who had a similar issue. They pointed me to this blog:

 

https://wetterssource.com/ts-desktop-analytics

 

and this script

 

https://wetterssource.com/ts-desktop-analytics-part2

 

This is the cause. Previously I had a GPO that used to block telemetry - the GPO had "allow telemetry" set to 0 as a USER property. Whilst my WUFB enforced a setting of 1 for the USER property, this is not reflected in other profiles, only the logged on profile. I needed to run the PS1 script to kill the setting on those hives. this wont be an issue because if that user logs in again that setting will be recreated by the GPO. This is because the census program checks the value of allowtelemetry on all profiles, if it encounters a single 0 then it wont run at all - the enddate reg_sz is not populated and you get an error message.

 

In short, it was cause by other profiles having a telemetry of 0 even though the current user had a telemetry of 1. If the blog goes down then the short answer is change AllowTelemetry to 0 for all users under key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\DataCollection\Users

 

It was enough for me to run C:\WINDOWS\system32\devicecensus.exe and then I could see that registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Census now has a new REG_SZ named EndTime with a date. This was what the error message was complaining about.

Edited August 10, 2022 by KK20