health checks

Optimize Your Active Directory Health

08 Oct: Active Directory Health Check using Microsoft Entra Connect Health Service

Active Directory (AD) is crucial in managing identities and resources within an organization. Ensuring its health is pivotal for the seamless operation of various services. Today, I decided to look at Microsoft Entra Connect Health (Azure AD Connect Health) service, which allows monitoring Azure AD Connect, ADFS, and Active Directory. This means that under a single umbrella, you can have an overview of three services health. But is it worth it?
img_5d6ecba81bf89

08 Sep: What do we say to health checking Active Directory?

Setting up a new Active Directory is an easy task. You download and install Windows Server, install required roles and in 4 hours or less have a basic Active Directory setup. In an ideal world that would be all and your only task would be to manage users, computers, and groups occasionally creating some Group Policies. Unfortunately, things with Active Directory aren’t as easy as I’ve pictured it. Active Directory is a whole ecosystem and works well ranging from small companies with ten users to 500k users or more (haven’t seen one myself – but so they say!). When you scale Active Directory adding more servers, more domains things tend to get complicated, and while things on top may look like they work correctly, in practice, they may not. That’s why, as an Administrator, you need to manage Active Directory in terms of its Health and Security. Seems easy right? Not quite. While you may think you have done everything, checked everything, there’s always something missing. Unless you have instructions for everything and can guarantee that things stay the same way as you left them forever, it’s a bit more complicated. That’s why Microsoft delivers you tools to the troubleshoot your Active Directory, such as dcdiag, repadmin and some others. They also sell monitoring solutions such as Microsoft SCOM which can help and detect when some things happen in your AD while you were gone. Surely there are some 3rd party companies give you some tools that can help with a lot of that as well. Finally, there is lo of folks within the community creating PowerShell scripts or functions that help with some Health Checks of your Active Directory.