Group Policy Analysis and Troubleshooting Overview

Understanding how to troubleshoot Group Policy is important in order to maintain corporate standards. IT professionals depend on the reliability of Group Policy to keep networks secure and managed, and to lower operating costs. When trying to understand why Group Policy did not apply to a computer or user in an expected manner, understanding where to locate and how to read and analyze information can make the difference between a small network issue and hours of downtime.

Troubleshooting Group Policy becomes complicated because Group Policy is not just a single component or application that resides locally on a single computer. Group Policy is a processing infrastructure used to deliver and apply one or more desired configurations or policy settings to a set of targeted users and computers within an Active Directory environment. This processing infrastructure consists of a Group Policy engine and multiple client-side extensions (CSEs) responsible for reading specific policy settings on target client computers. And during Group Policy processing Group Policy must access domain-based information describing Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that is stored in both the Active Directory, in the Group Policy container (GPC), and the SYSVOL, which provides a standard location to store the Group Policy template (GPT).

The Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) provides a starting point when approaching troubleshooting Group Policy. Functionality from number of separate tools, such as GPupdate.exe and GPOtool, has been rolled into the GPMC in Windows Server 2012.

A methodology for troubleshooting Group Policy using the GPMC grows out of a number of factors to consider:

• Ensure Group Policy has processed the most current set of computer and user settings.
  
  
  • Force a Remote Group Policy Refresh (GPUpdate)
    
    
  • Check that Group Policy Object information has replicated to all domain controllers. See Check Group Policy Infrastructure Status
    
    
  • Check for Group Policy errors and events
    
    
• Investigate configurations that affect the Resultant Set of Policy
  
  
  • Slow link
    
    
  • Loopback
    
    
  • Security Filtering
    
    
  • Block inheritance
    
    
  • Enforced GPO
    
    
  • Disable the entire GPO or the computer/user portion of the GPO
    
    
• Understand core Group Policy processing.
  
  
  • Understand how changes to the Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 startup process impact Group Policy processing
    
    
  • Understand how migrating Group Policy to a separate service affects core Group Policy processing
    
    
  • Check for Group Policy errors and events using the GPMC reports
    
    
• Understand Group Policy client side extension processing
  
  
  • Understand the expected behavior of the Group Policy preference extensions
    
    
  • Determine what GPO contains a setting that has been applied to a computer or user
    
    

The below links provide troubleshooting information for components that affect Group Policy functionality.