Active Directory Monitoring — Monitor Performance, Changes, and Health

Active Directory is a Windows Server OS database designed to connect users with their network resources, devices, and nodes. Active Directory contains critical information on which users and devices are present and who’s allowed access to which resources. For many enterprises, Active Directory is central to business operations and access management capabilities, enabling users to securely access devices, systems, and applications.

Active Directory is at the core of many IT environments on-premises or in the cloud, as Active Directory can record account users, permissions, and other details along with IT infrastructure data and branches into many other platforms.

Like any critical element of your IT infrastructure, an issue with Active Directory can be damaging to productivity and could negatively affect users and services. Active Directory solutions are designed to help you more easily monitor service availability and other Active Directory monitoring metrics to ensure operations are running smoothly.

Active Directory change monitoring requires you to keep a close watch on Active Directory and identify changes as they arise. An Active Directory monitoring tool can help you collect the necessary metrics for monitoring Active Directory health. This includes Active Directory change monitoring metrics, such as Active Directory password change monitoring data, and other Active Directory server monitoring information reflecting changes.

Here are some metrics you can gather through Active Directory change monitoring using an Active Directory diagnostics tool:

• User account was created event: Amount of new user accounts created.
• Account password was changed event: How many times an account password was changed.
• Attempt to change account password event: Attempts to make password changes. When a new password doesn’t meet password policy, this event is logged as a failure.
• Account was changed event: Changes made in relation to security account properties.
• Account name was changed event: Number of times a user changed their logon name. This could signify rogue admins, who change their account or computer name to cover up activity.
• System time was changed event: Any time someone changes system time. It’s common to see this logged twice in a row.

It’s important to be consistent in your Active Directory password change monitoring and regularly gather all relevant Active Directory change monitoring metrics. An Active Directory monitoring tool is designed to help you accurately and routinely monitor Active Directory health changes, replication changes, and more performance modifications.

To effectively perform Active Directory server health monitoring, you can use an Active Directory diagnostics tool to analyze Active Directory services and counters, which can offer in-depth insights into your Active Directory health and performance.

Monitoring metrics for file replication services, directory services, domain controllers, and dependencies in Active Directory can help you more easily:

• Identify failures on replications or slow replication rates between websites caused by network issues
• Ensure email and phone contacts are synced
• Prevent service outages by detecting performance issues with CPU usage, connected users, failed logins, account lockouts, and more
• Troubleshoot Active Directory dependency issues

Active Directory health check tools can enable you to understand health metrics in context with relevant thresholds. You can more easily track critical health aspects of Active Directory by gathering relevant health monitoring data.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) provides Active Directory and Azure AD monitoring functions to more easily collect and analyze Active Directory insights.

One key Active Directory monitoring feature is AppInsight for Active Directory, which is a specialized and complex template designed for in-depth Active Directory monitoring available out-of-the-box to offer a level of detail and expert knowledge beyond what standard monitoring templates can provide.

Monitoring Active Directory components can enable you to monitor Active Directory domain controllers, replication, and other important metrics throughout AD environments. You can automatically enable AppInsight during Discovery or manually add AppInsight to individual nodes later as you need.

You can use AppInsight to monitor data at the server level and drill down into the datastore layer for additional performance metrics. AppInsight for Active Directory is built to provide you with status and metric insights to help you more easily identify replication failures, phone and email synchronization issues, and service outages, and troubleshoot dependency issues that can negatively affect performance.