Introduction

  • Article

The Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Active Directory® Domain Services Management Pack for Operations Manager 2005 provides a predefined, ready-to-run set of rules, monitoring scripts, and reports that are designed specifically to monitor the performance and availability of Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). The Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack monitors events that are placed in the Application, System, and Directory Service event logs by various AD DS components and subsystems. The Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack also monitors the overall health of AD DS and alerts you to critical performance issues.

Note

If you have Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs) in your network environment, be sure to read the Known Issues section of this document to learn about the additional steps that are required for RODC discovery.

The Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack provides a complete AD DS monitoring solution by:

  • Monitoring all major aspects of AD DS health (for example, service initialization or data issues that are causing startup failures)
  • Monitoring the health of vital processes that AD DS depends on, including, but not limited to, the following:
    • Replication
    • Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
    • Domain controller locator
    • Trusts
    • Net Logon service
    • File Replication Service (FRS)
    • Intersite Messaging service
    • Windows Time service
    • Key Distribution Center (KDC)
  • Monitoring service availability
  • Collecting key performance data
  • Providing comprehensive reports, which include reports that you can use for capacity planning and reports about service availability and service health

By detecting critical events and creating alerts for them, the Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack helps to indicate, correct, and prevent possible AD DS service outages.

What’s new?

With the previous version of the Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack, you could only monitor replication latency for all domain controllers as a single group, and each configuration group could include members from only a single forest. With this version, you can define multiple groups of domain controllers and assign individual replication latency monitoring thresholds for each group. You can also include any number of forests per configuration group.