Active Directory Monitoring using eG Enterprise

Complete Active Directory Health Check and Performance Assurance

Active Directory is a critical component of any modern data center. Providing network access rights management, the Active Directory Domain Service authenticates and authorizes users and computers across the network, and it also enforces security policies. A performance glitch, service failure or downtime of an Active Directory Domain Controller (DC) will result in user logon failures, account lockouts, and even Group Policy implementation lapses.

eG Enterprise is an end-to-end Active Directory monitoring and management tool that alerts system administrators of performance, availability and replication issues, service failures, Kerberos issues, DNS errors, etc., so that they can triage issues in real time. eG Enterprise helps IT teams keep Active Directory running at peak performance, avoid user productivity disruptions, reduce helpdesk complaints, and ensure compliance with security policies.

Getting to the Root Cause of Active Directory Problems

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  Find and Fix Replication and Time Sync Issues Proactively

  Replication is a key function of Active Directory where changes to objects, security policy or Group Policy are replicated from one DC to others in a domain or in an AD forest. When there's replication failure, there can be inconsistencies with roaming profiles, mapped drives, password resets, and Group Policy updates.

  eG Enterprise provides deep visibility into the Domain Controller and monitors replication status and time sync issues. You will be the first to know when replication fails and before there's any business impact.

  Key AD Replication Metrics Monitored
  Replication failures Sync request failures Pending replication synchronizations Replication queue size Lingering messages Staging space used/free USN records accepted DFS errors, warnings		DFS replication backlog Joins, unjoins, bindings Change orders sent/received DRA inbound/outbound objects Replication errors, warnings, information, and verbose count Inter-site and Intra-site replication in/out rates

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  Detect Slow Logons, Account Lockouts and Authentication Issues

  • Monitor the NetLogon service to find out if there are more than acceptable semaphore waiters and timeouts, which could cause authentication delays
  • Track AD events to identify logon failures
  • Monitor Group Policy changes, which might be a cause of slow logon execution
  • Report on the number of account lockouts and users that got locked out, and identify where the login attempts originated from
  • Get to know which computers and users have never been logged on, inactive and disabled in AD
  • Get alerted to unusually repetitive logon failures, which might indicate a security breach

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  Triage Active Directory Server Problems with Ease

  • Continuously track AD availability and response time, and get alerted to failure of AD services and processes
  • Track LDAP bind time, packet loss, and network delay on the FSMO Domain Controller
  • Monitor the asynchronous thread queue (ATQ) delay and latency
  • Monitor the Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) database cache and waiting threads
  • Report on database file and log file storage to know how much disk space is utilized
  • Detect if any computer/user creations in Security Accounts Manager (SAM) fail, or if it takes too long to enumerate, evaluate, and authenticate users/user groups
  • Identify the number of errors in the trust relationship between the configured domain and other domains
  • Check if any global catalogs are unavailable on the Domain Controller

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  Remediate AD Issues Remotely with Built-in Troubleshooting Tools

  eG Enterprise includes built-in script-based Remote Control Actions that can be used to remotely troubleshoot Active Directory issues. Some of the built-in action include:

  • Enabling/disabling AD account
  • Unlocking AD account
  • Purge DNS resolver cache
  • Query FSMO roles
  • Reset AD user passwords
  • Refresh computer Group Policy
  • Show group membership for a user
  • Show AD trusts
  • Show privileged accounts

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  Proactively Catch DNS Issues Affecting AD Performance

  • Synthetically check if Domain Controllers are registered in DNS, whether they can be pinged, and if they have LADP or RPC
  • Check whether DNS client, Netlogon, KDC, and DNS Server services are running
  • Test if forwarders and root links are functioning on the Domain Controller
  • Ensure there are not broken delegations on the DNS server
  • Monitor if an AD domain is configured for secure dynamic update and performs registration of a test record
  • Proactively check the functioning of record registration and external name resolution

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  Answer Key Active Directory Performance Questions

  • Is the AD server available? How quickly is it responding to requests?
  • Are there adequate work items to service blocking requests, or are too many requests getting rejected?
  • Have too many login attempts failed?
  • Is schema cache effectively utilized, or is disk read/write activity high?
  • Is the server currently overloaded? Are sufficient Domain Controllers available in the environment to handle the load?
  • Are changes to the AD server getting replicated across and within sites?
  • How many directory synchronizations are in queue? Is the number high enough to force a replication?

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Benefits

• Ensure peak performance of Active Directory services through continuous monitoring
• Let end-users enjoy fast and seamless access to their computers and AD-authenticated applications
• Reduce helpdesk tickets by proactively detecting user-impacting issues and resolving them
• Get extensive reporting of AD events and logs for compliance with security standards
• Reduce troubleshooting time with automatic performance correlation and root cause diagnostics: identify if it's an AD issue, DNS/DHCP issue, network issue, or a server hardware issue that's affecting AD performance

Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.

• eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
• Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
• Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
• Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
• Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
• Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)