Availability and performance tool vendor Winternals has developed diagnostic software designed to help corporate users ferret out problems in Microsoft’s Active Directory that could knock critical applications offline.
The company last week released Insight for Active Directory, a tool that can pinpoint the cause of failures in applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, or in services such as DNS that rely on Active Directory. The software monitors the communication between Active Directory and the network nodes that talk to it, and it highlights anything that is outside the norm of operations. The problems can arise from configuration, corruption or communication issues within the directory.
“We noticed some replication problems we were having, and we hooked up this tool, and it almost immediately showed us where the issues were,” says Daryl Shorts, LAN administrator for Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La. “We had made some rule changes earlier, and some things didn’t get removed from the directory. We were able to diagnose it in about an hour.” Shorts said it might have taken him up to a week to get that diagnosis using Microsoft tools such as Replication Monitor.
Shorts also uses Insight for Active Directory to weed out problems in a test environment he has set up as part of a migration to Windows Server 2003 that will include a new Active Directory forest to serve the medical center’s 9,000 users, 300 servers and 10 domain controllers that run Active Directory.
“The tool is useful for troubleshooting, but we won’t use it for everyday monitoring,” Shorts says. The Winternals software competes with directory tools from such vendors as NetPro and Quest Software.
Insight for Active Directory, which installs on an administrative console, keeps an eye on Active Directory domain controllers on the network. The software does not pull operations data from within Active Directory; instead it monitors all the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol transactions that happen between Active Directory and computers on the network. The software can determine if the transaction failed and why.
“We tell you the sentences and the words of the conversation and the explicit functions that went wrong,” says Jonathan Borden, vice president of development for Winternals.
“You know the error, where it is located, and you can use the information to track the problem,” he says. The software also details the path to every object in the directory to help trace the problem in such things as authentication or response times.
To further pinpoint problems, the software’s console provides color-coded highlights of errors and a visual representation of directory events that are related.
Insight for Active Directory starts at $395 for one console. Each server monitored costs $249; each desktop costs $20.
