System Center Monitoring Pack for Active Directory (AD)

The Monitoring Pack for Active Directory (AD) provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Active Directory deployment.

 Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=21357

Overview

The Monitoring Pack for Active Directory (AD) provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Active Directory deployment. It monitors events that various Active Directory components and subsystems place in the Application, System, and Service event logs. It also monitors the overall health of the Active Directory system and provides alerts for critical performance issues.

The monitoring that this monitoring pack provides includes monitoring of domain controllers and monitoring of health from the perspective of clients that use Active Directory resources. To monitor domain controllers, ADMP 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 domain controllers.

Because client computers in your Active Directory environment can experience connectivity and service issues even when domain controllers appear to be operating correctly, ADMP includes the Active Directory Client Management Pack, which can help you identify such issues. The Active Directory Client Management Pack monitors the services that domain controllers provide. It provides information—in addition to the information that is collected directly on the domain controllers—about whether domain controllers are available by running transactions, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) binds and pings, against the directory service.

The March 2012 revision of the Monitoring Pack for Active Directory includes the following changes:

• Corrected some Publisher names (for example, changed from PublisherName=KDC to PublisherName=Microsoft-Windows-Kerberos-Key-Distribution-Center)
• Updated rules to generate Alerts and not only go to the Event Viewer
• Removed unnecessary check for Event Source Name for all NTDS rules (for example, removed EventSourceName=”NTDS General”)
• Corrected event parameter validation
• Updated queries to search for correct event IDs
• Fixed spelling errors
• Added missing descriptions to rules
• Fixed problems with Health Monitoring scripts
• Removed user name checks from Userenv rules

Feature Summary

• Replication
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
• Domain Controller Locator (DCLocator)
• Trusts
• Net Logon service
• File Replication Service (FRS)
• Intersite Messaging service
• Windows Time service
• Key Distribution Center (KDC)
• Service availability monitoring
• Key performance data collection
• Comprehensive reports, including reports about service availability and service health, plus reports that you can use for capacity planning

Release History

• 3/30/2012 - Updated release, version 6.0.7822.0, with fixes to bugs reported by customers.
• 10/6/2011 - Updated release, version 6.0.7670.0, with fixes to bugs reported by customers and architectural issues to facilitate future Operations Manager's releases
• 11/3/2009 - Updated release, version 6.0.7065.0, with added Windows Server 2008 R2 support
• 11/7/2008 - Initial release for 2000/2003/2008, version 6.0.6452.0
• 03/26/2008 - QFE, version 6.0.6278.10
• 03/17/2008 - QFE, version 6.0.6278.3
• 1/15/2008 - Updated Guide - same version
• 3/23/2007 - Initial Release, version 6.0.5000.0

System requirements

Supported operating systems: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86), Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

• Other Supported Systems:
• Virtual environment
• Clustered servers
• Writeable domain controllers
• Read-only domain controller (RODC)
• Domain member computers (Client and Server)
Note: Agentless monitoring and stand-alone or workgroup member computers are not supported.

Important: Migration from Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 to Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 is not supported, but a side-by-side installation of these two products is supported. All support is subject to the Microsoft overall Help and Support life cycle and the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Supported Configurations document.

Instructions

Download the monitoring pack, install the monitoring pack package, and follow the included User Guide. For more information, see How to Import a mornitoring Pack in Operations Manager 2007.

Note: Prior to install any new language packs, previous installed language packs have to be uninstalled first.