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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In our company we check active directory health with scriptlogic’s tool called spotlight on active directory http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/spotlight-on-active-directory
The tool can display the entire active directory site and replication infrastructure as an easy to understand graphical view.
In addition this solution includes comprehensive analysis tests for easy determining that core active directory proccesess are working properly.