The Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Active Directory deployment. It monitors events that various Active Directory components and subsystems place in the Application, System, and Service event logs. It also monitors the overall health of the Active Directory system and provides alerts for critical performance issues.

The monitoring that this management pack provides includes monitoring of domain controllers and monitoring of health from the perspective of clients that use Active Directory resources. To monitor domain controllers, ADMP provides a predefined, ready-to-run set of processing rules, monitoring scripts, and reports that are designed specifically to monitor the performance and availability of domain controllers.

Because client computers in your Active Directory environment can experience connectivity and service issues even when domain controllers appear to be operating correctly, ADMP includes the Active Directory Client Management Pack, which can help you identify such issues. The Active Directory Client Management Pack monitors the services that domain controllers provide. It provides information—in addition to the information that is collected directly on the domain controllers—about whether domain controllers are available by running transactions, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) binds and pings, against the directory service.

The December 2012 revision of the Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center includes the following changes:

Product knowledge improvements
Excessive alert fixes
Script error fixes
Rule error fixes

For more details about these fixes, see the included management pack guide.

Feature Summary

Replication
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
Domain Controller Locator (DCLocator)
Trusts
Net Logon service
File Replication Service (FRS)
Intersite Messaging service
Windows Time service
Key Distribution Center (KDC)
Service availability monitoring
Key performance data collection
Comprehensive reports, including reports about service availability and service health, plus reports that you can use for capacity planning