Compass is a unique and innovative systems management tool that combines all the key elements for Active Directory monitoring and reporting delivered in a single easy to use dashboard. It was developed by Active Directory Architects that have had real world experience managing and troubleshooting numerous enterprise environments.
Why is monitoring your Active Directory infrastructure critical? Active Directory is a distributed service that relies upon many interdependent parts spread across all your devices in your organization. Continual monitoring is necessary to ensure that your users can be productive and access the resources needed to perform their jobs. As you increase the size of your organization it becomes a challenge to monitor all the critical aspects of AD.
With Compass Active Directory monitoring, you can avoid the following problems:
- Logon failure.
- Logon failure can occur throughout the domain or forest if a trust relationship or name resolution fails, or if a global catalog server cannot determine universal group membership.
- Account lockout.
- User and service accounts can become locked out if the PDC emulator is unavailable in the domain or replication fails between several domain controllers.
- Domain Controller failure.
- If the drive containing the Ntds.dit file runs out of disk space, the domain controller stops functioning.
- Application failure.
- Applications that are critical to your business, such as Microsoft Exchange or another e-mail application, can fail if address book queries into the directory fail.
- Inconsistent directory data.
- If replication fails for an extended period of time, objects (known as lingering objects and re-animated objects) can be created in the directory and might require extensive diagnosis and time to eliminate.
- Account creation failure.
- A domain controller is unable to create user or computer accounts if it exhausts its supply of relative IDs and the RID master is unavailable.
- Security policy failure.
- If the SYSVOL shared folder does not replicate properly, Group Policy objects and security policies are not properly applied to clients.
Compass monitors the following areas:
- Real-time network monitoring of all domain controllers. Ensure that they are able to communicate to users and with other DC’s in the same domain, site and forest.
- Name Resolution verification. Compass automatically validates your Domain Controller DNS settings.
- Continuous verification of core AD services. Compass keeps an eye on all the key services including: Netlogon, AD Domain, DHCP, DNS, KKDC, and Time.
- Operating system monitoring - components such as disk space, memory, cpu and memory usage.
- Replication monitoring. Replication issues are not always easy to uncover. Compass makes it easy by notifying you if there is an issue.
- AD Backup verification. don't get caught with your pants down. Ensure that your AD is backed up regularly.