Active Directory Reporter

Reports generated for different activities that are conducted on the Windows Active Directory play a very important rile for administrators in keeping a proper record for reference use. In fact, the Active Directory report facilitate administrators with much needed significant information about AD infrastructure along with Ad components that includes objects, domains, sites, groups, OUs, etc. Active Directory reporter tools are helpful applications which also assist in generating routine, configuration and audit Active Directory reports. These reports facilitate in processing data about user accounts, service level availability issues, Active Directory trending, etc.

The AD management pack for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) offers a predefined set of reports which are specially developed to observe the performance as well as the availability of all the Active Directory services. The management pack for MOM generates complete reports, including those on service availability and reports that provide estimation on capacity planning.

However, the AD replication monitoring report is disabled in the management pack by default. So, if you wish to enable this report, administrators need to enable the data collection report using the configuration information provided in the Active Directory Latency Performance Data Collection- Sources Rule Group descriptions. The Active Directory reporter utility of the Management Pack offer diverse types of reports, some of them are explained in the next section.

Some of the reports which provide data about AD configuration information are mentioned below:

• AD Domain Controllers: It provides a complete list of all domain controllers, along with their IP addresses and sites within a selected domain.
• AD Role Holders: It offers a list of all computers which hold one or more operations master role or act as global catalog servers.
• AD Replication Objects: It summarizes the AD replication topology and then provides offers a list of connection objects.
• AD Replication Links: It provides the outline of current replication site link configuration for Active Directory.

Reports which provide information about Active Directory disk space are as follows:

• AD DC Disk Space: This report summarizes the disk space usage and free space for Active Directory database and log volumes. This report proves very helpful for administrators as it let them to predict the volume sizes depending upon the current growth rate.

The reports through which administrators obtain information about Active Directory operations are given below:

• AD Domain Changes: This report provides data in relation to the noteworthy changes that are made in the domain like addition or elimination of domain controllers and movement of PDC emulator operations master.
• AD Machine Account Authentication Failures: This report summarizes data regarding to workstations which are not able to authenticate and therefore prevent Group Policy updates and software distribution to computers.
• AD SAM Account Errors: Provides report on events which point towards the SAM that has detected an error and provide info on corrective guidance.

Reports which provide information on Active Directory replication process are as follows:

AD Replication Bandwidth: This report provides a synopsis for both uncompressed and compressed replication bandwidth over a selected period. This report is very effective in capacity planning.

AD Replication Latency: The report provides data about nominal average and maximum replication latency per naming context, per domain controller. In fact, the report can be used to confirm service legal agreements (SLA) within a domain or forest.