Application Monitoring

NimBUS for Microsoft Active Directory Monitoring

Insights for Maximizing Reliability and Performance

If an enterprise’s Windows infrastructure has a heart, it is certainly located within Active Directory. A central component of the Windows platform, the Active Directory service provides the means to manage the elements, users, and relationships that make up the corporate network.

Through Active Directory, organizations manage which users can access which applications, which email address gets routed to which user, and the list goes on. As such it’s a critical hub that plays a vital role in the proper functioning of an organization’s Windows infrastructure—and so that of the very business. How can organizations ensure their vital Active Directory services are functioning optimally? How can administrators gain visibility into potential issues—before they affect users?

The NimBUS for Active Directory Monitoring solution offers an effective way to monitor and manage the performance of an organization’s Active Directory servers. With the NimBUS solution, organizations gain a comprehensive view of all critical processes taking place, enabling administrators to not only understand, but effect how the Active Directory servers perform. With these insights, administrators can identify and address minor performance issues before they result in outages.

The NimBUS for Active Directory Monitoring solution is fully integrated with Nimsoft’s Service Level Management suite, enabling enterprises and service providers to manage their entire infrastructure with a single solution.

Monitors

• Active Directory Replication Monitoring
• Active Directory Server Availability and Response
• Active Directory Query Response

Features

• Centralized views of all vital Active Directory performance data 
• Point and click access to high level server status and detailed checkpoint information
• Intuitive installation and seamless integration

Benefits

• Improved performance and uptime. Proactive monitoring and alerting accelerates identification of performance issues—enabling response before end user productivity is affected.
• Enhanced resource optimization. Centralized, cohesive view of performance delivers insights into opportunities for resource optimization.
• SLA compliance. Instant alerts and real-time dashboards notify service managers in advance of SLA compliance breaches.

Active Directory Replication Monitoring—Given the central, vital role active directory plays in so many of an organization’s critical processes, the need for replication to happen quickly and consistently is of paramount importance—if it’s slow or unreliable, critical business processes can be hampered or stop altogether.

The NimBUS Active Directory probe provides the information administrators need to monitor replication and ensure it happens how and when it needs to.

The NimBUS probe enables organizations to monitor all their Active Directory servers, both within an office and those at any number of remote locations. With the NimBUS probe, administrators can continually monitor the following replication aspects:

• Write performance. For replication to occur, the primary server must accept updates. The NimBUS probe ensures this is the case, monitoring both whether the server can be written to and, if so, how long it takes.
• Read performance. The NimBUS probe monitors this activity, verifying whether Active Directory server objects and attributes can be read, and if so, how long it takes to do the read.
• Replication reliability. The update written to the primary server must be reliably propagated to all applicable secondary servers. The NimBUS solution can verify whether the data update made at the primary server was successfully written to each of the secondary servers.
• Replication performance. The time between the update occurring on the primary server and the time it takes that change to be reflected across Active Directory servers in the forest is a critical metric. The NimBUS probe can measure the duration it takes for changes to make it from a primary to a secondary server.

Further, the NimBUS probe enables administrators to set thresholds for any of the intervals measured, and when those thresholds are exceeded, alarms can be triggered, for example, if the length of a read operation or the duration of data replication takes too long, administrators will be instantly notified.

Active Directory Server Availability and Response—If an Active Directory server is slow in responding or goes down altogether, administrators need to get immediate notification, and, with the NimBUS probe, they can. The NimBUS probe, at user defined intervals, will test whether associated applications and services can access the Active Directory server, and, if so, how long it takes to establish a connection.

Active Directory Query Response—Given the constant, critical demands placed on Active Directory’s query capabilities, administrators need to know whether those capabilities are functioning, and functioning in an expected behavior. With the NimBUS probe, administrators gain fast, convenient visibility into whether query capabilities are operational, and, if so, how long a single query takes, and whether the expected number of search results is returned.

Prerequisites—To operate the NimBUS for Active Directory Monitoring solution, the Microsoft .Net 2.0 Runtime Library is required.

If you would like to request a free trial of NimBUS, please click here. For free white papers or additional information click here.