Monitoring Windows Domain Controllers

Windows Domain Controllers are critical components of IT infrastructures. Users accessing resources in a Windows domain have to first be authenticated by the Domain Controller in order to get access. Any slowdown or failure of the domain controllers can severely impact users. Hence, 24x7 monitoring of domain controllers is critical.

The eG Enterprise provides a specialized Domain Controller monitoring model for the Windows domain controller (DC) (see Figure 1), using which key performance parameters related to the DC can be continuously monitored, and anomalies, instantly detected.

Figure 1 : Layer model of a Windows Domain Controller

Each of the layers in this specialized model (see Figure 1) executes a wide variety of tests on the DC and extracts critical metrics, which help quantify the performance level achieved by the DC, and simplifies problem identification.

The Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document deals extensively with the bottom 5 layers of Figure 1. See The DC Server Layer topic to know about the tests mapped to the Windows Server layer.