Active Directory Health Checks

We plan on having an outside company come in and do a AD/Exchange health check before we work on our domain migration project. This article will give me a head start on all of this.

Health Checks on Domain Controllers

I get asked over and over about what I do when I’m performing a health check on a domain controller. Below you will see some of the commands that I use when I need to ensure my domain controllers are still healthy after some sort of change…like patching.
The Event Viewer is always a must. I look at all the logs before and after the update to the domain controller looking for abnormal events. With the pre-check I usually go back a month of logs to get more historical data. I then run through a couple command line utilities. One thing I always do is pipe my commands out to a text document. This just makes it easier for me to read and also search for failed events.
Dcdiag.exe /v >> c:\temp\pre_dcdiag.txt
This is a must and will always tell you if there is trouble with your DCs and/or services associated with it

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