Overview of the Active Directory Management Pack

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

This guide provides information about the most common Active Directory monitoring scenarios, state monitoring definitions, tasks, reports, and views. This guide also includes instructions for deploying and operating the Active Directory Management Pack.

The Active Directory Management Pack provides a complete Active Directory monitoring solution by:

• Monitoring all aspects of Active Directory health.

• Monitoring the health of vital processes that Active Directory depends on, including replication, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), DC Locator, trusts, Net Logon service, File Replication service (FRS), Intersite Messaging service, Windows Time service, and Key Distribution Center (KDC).

• Monitoring service availability.

• Collecting key performance data.

• Providing comprehensive reports, including reports on service availability and service health and reports that can be useful for capacity planning.

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

This guide was developed using the Active Directory Management Pack for MOM 2005. To ensure that you are using the most recent version of the Active Directory Management Pack, see Microsoft Operations Manager Management Packs on the Microsoft Web site at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=33752.

On This Page

What’s New in the Active Directory Management Pack for MOM 2005
Monitoring Scenarios
State Monitoring Definitions
Tasks
Reports
Views
Agentless Monitoring Support

What’s New in the Active Directory Management Pack for MOM 2005

The Active Directory Management Pack for MOM 2005 provides the following improvements and additions:

• Improved alert suppression.

• Improved and updated knowledge for all alerts.

• Global catalog availability tests, which are added to the Client Pack.

• State level monitoring for key Active Directory components.

• Topological views representing site links and connection objects.

Monitoring Scenarios

The Active Directory Management Pack is designed to provide valuable monitoring information for most implementations of Active Directory.

Note

The Active Directory Management Pack does not support monitoring multiple-forest Active Directory configurations. To monitor multiple forests using the Active Directory Management Pack, configure a separate MOM Management Group for each forest. For more information about how to configure MOM management groups, see Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Help that is installed with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

Table 1 describes the most common Active Directory Management Pack monitoring scenarios.

Table 1   Active Directory Management Pack Monitoring Scenarios

State Monitoring Definitions

The Active Directory Management Pack provides state monitoring based on the definitions in Table 2.

Note

The Active Directory Management Pack collects service discovery data every 30 minutes by default. Therefore, Active Directory–specific discovery data might not appear in the MOM Operator console until up to 30 minutes after the Management Pack is deployed.

Table 2   Active Directory Management Pack State Monitoring Definitions

Tasks

Active Directory Management Pack tasks provide increased manageability by enabling you to manage Active Directory directly from the MOM console. The Active Directory Management Pack tasks that can be performed from the MOM console are described in Table 3.

Table 3   Active Directory Management Pack Tasks

Table 4   Active Directory Management Pack Advanced Tasks

Note

Many tasks that are listed in this table require the use of support tools. Support tools are located in the Support Tools directory on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 operating system CDs.

Reports

Active Directory Management Pack reports provide important information in the areas of trending, user account problems, configuration, and service level availability.

Data collection for the AD Replication Monitoring report is disabled by default. A MOM administrator must enable data collection for this report to run properly. For information about how to enable this report, see the Configuration information in the Active Directory Replication Latency Performance Data Collection — Sources (and Targets) Rule Group descriptions.

Table 5 describes reports that display Active Directory configuration information.

Table 5   Active Directory Configuration Reports

Table 6 describes the report that displays disk space information for Active Directory.

Table 6   Active Directory Disk Space Report

Table 7 describes reports that display Active Directory operations information.

Table 7   Active Directory Operations Reports

Table 8 describes reports that display Active Directory replication information.

Table 8   Active Directory Replication Reports

Views

Active Directory Management Pack views provide a way for administrators to scope the information that has been reported to MOM.

Tables 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 briefly describe the default public views that are provided with the Active Directory Management Pack.

Table 9   Active Directory Event Views

Table 10   Active Directory Performance Views

Table 11   Active Directory Alert Views

Table 12   Active Directory Task Status Views

Table 13   Active Directory Computer Group Views

Table 14   Active Directory Diagram Views

Note

The Active Directory Management Pack collects service discovery data every 30 minutes by default. Therefore, Active Directory–specific discovery data might not appear in the MOM Operator console until up to 30 minutes after the Management Pack is deployed..

Agentless Monitoring Support

The Active Directory Management Pack for MOM 2005 does not support agentless monitoring.