While, as an Active Directory admin, you could monitor your Active Directory Domain Controllers by hand on a weekly basis and iron out the kinks and hope your colleagues or customers don’t get affected by problems that plague the servers running these critical networking services, you could also just use System Center Operations Manager.

About System Center Operations Manager

With Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) you can leave the monitoring and alerting to software in a confident, fast and robust way. Now you can simply create an availability or replication bandwidth report by pressing a single button. No longer do you have to follow tedious routines to check up on your servers: The products in the System Center were created to do those things for you. Before Operations Manager became a part of the System Center family, it was known as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) comes with the basic set of monitoring tools to monitor Windows Servers. These basic monitoring capabilities can be extended using Monitoring Packs for specific Server Roles and Server Products. Even more, Operations Manager features an extensibility framework to allow any 3rd party developer to write Monitoring Packs. Packs have been written to manage UPS’s and even Linux hosts. Of course, monitoring is of little use in big environments with repeating errors, so System Center Operations Manager is designed to work together with the other members of the System Center family of products, like System Center Configuration Manager (formerly known as SMS Server) and System Center Orchestrator (formerly known as Opalis).

About the Active Directory Monitoring Pack

Active Directory Domain Services is a Server Role in Windows Server and Microsoft has deemed it fit to have its own Monitoring Pack. Even more, Microsoft has dedicated valuable time to actively maintain the Monitoring Pack for Active Directory. The version of the Active Directory Monitoring Pack, released today, is 6.0.7670.0 and is the fifth version of the Monitoring Pack since it’s original version (6.0.5000.0).

What’s new in this release?

This release focuses fixing problems reported by customers. The accompanying guide mentions:

• Event-ID 333 is logged incorrectly on systems with Active Directory databases larger than 4GB.
• 20% of the alerts are not triggered on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controllers due to wrong event ID mapping, due to changes in the event sources for several events.
• Performance data is not collected due to wrong event ID mapping on Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers.
• Performance counter selected by default is wrong, preventing Replication Latency Performance data from appearing.
• Time skew alert is not triggered due to script defect.
• Operation master monitor is broken due to script defect.
• Frequent operation master alert description misspelled.

This release also includes fixes to architectural issues to facilitate future System Center Operations Manager releases.

Call to Action

Unless you’re monitoring Windows 2000 Server-based Domain Controllers, you should update the Active Directory Monitoring Pack to version 6.0.7670.0 in your System Center Operations Manager environment. If you haven’t done so recently first update the Windows Server Operating System Management Pack. You should at least run version 6.0.6667.0 of this Monitoring Pack. (the hyperlink above links to version 6.0.6957.0)

Although no further management packs are required for the Active Directory Management Pack to perform, the following management packs might be of interest because they complement the Active Directory monitoring services:

• Windows Server DNS 2000/2003/2008 Management Pack
• File Services Management Pack (for monitoring FRS and DFSR)
• Windows Server 2003R2/2008 DFS Replication Monitoring Management Pack
• Windows Server 2003/2008 Group Policy Monitoring Pack
• System Center Monitoring Pack for Active Directory Rights Management Services
• Active Directory Certificate Services Monitoring Management Pack

Al these Management Packs are provided free of charge.

Further reading

Updated System Center Monitoring Pack for Active Directory
Updated – System Center Monitoring Pack for Active Directory (AD)
OopsMgr: New MP – Active Directory Management Pack 6.0.7670.0
[SCOM] Mise à jour Management Pack Active Directory (AD)
OpsMgr: MP Update: Active Directory MP version 6.0.7670.0 ships