Monitoring Active Directory

[Steve]

Hello,

We have been considering purchasing some active
directory monitoring tools that audit OU changes and
monitor overall health of AD including DNS. Does anybody
have any preferences to what brands you use? Do you use
anything at all? Is there a product I should stay away
from. Thanks to all who take the time to offer some
advice.

 

[Simon Geary]

You can't go wrong with Microsoft's own offering
http://www.microsoft.com/mom/ although it's a crowded market. Solutions from
NetIQ and Winternals seem to be well regarded also.

Before shelling out though, why not see if there are any built-in free tools
that will do the job. Audit OU changes? Just enable auditing and check your
security event logs. Overall health of AD? dcdiag, netdiag, frsdiag,
ultrasound, perfmon, perfwiz, spa, mps reports etc. etc. are all free tools
that will help.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...78-e4aa-47b9-901b-cf85da075a73&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...7c-7ca5-408f-88b7-f9c79b7306c0&DisplayLang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...87-8422-408c-9375-2d9aaf939fa3&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...98-c3a1-4644-9622-faa046d69214&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/fileandprint/file/dfs/tshootfrs.mspx

 

[Churritos]

[FONT=&quot]I can recommend a few different companies. Quest, NetWrix, ScriptLogic, NetIQ and Blackbird are the best in my opinion, and who to go with depends on what you’re looking for. All of these companies offer comparably robust change auditing tools, but the prices for Quest and ScriptLogic are very high. NetWrix and NetIQ are good options. [/FONT]

 

[Churritos]

A few good options are Quest ChangeAuditor, NetIQ Change Guardian for AD and NetWrix Active Directory Change Reporter. All of these 3 have comparable feature sets, so it’s worth evaluating all 3. We wound up going with NetWrix because of pricing, but all 3 are very good.