Active Directory Replication Monitor

The SiteScope Active Directory Replication Monitor allows you to monitor the time that it takes replication to occur between up to ten Domain Controllers. The error and warning thresholds for the monitor can be set on each of the monitored Domain Controllers.

Usage Guidelines

Use the Active Directory Replication Monitor to monitor the time that it takes a change on one Domain Controller to replicate to up to ten other Domain Controller. This allows you to verify that replication, a key part of the Active Directory System, is occurring within set thresholds. Create a separate Active Directory Replication Monitor for each Domain Controller that is being replicated throughout your system.

No additional setup is required other than access to a Domain Admin account.

The Active Directory Replication Monitor works by making a small change to part of the Directory Service tree of the configured Domain Controller. It then checks each of the configured Replicating Domain Controllers for this small change. As the change is detected the difference between when the change was made and when it was replicated is computed.

The default run schedule for this monitor is every 10 minutes, but you can change it to run more or less often using the Update every setting.

Completing the Active Directory Replication Monitor Form

To display the Active Directory Replication Monitor Form, either click the Edit link for an existing Active Directory Replication Monitor in a monitor table, or click the add a Monitor link on a group's detail page and click the Add Active Directory Replication Monitor link.

Complete the items on the Active Directory Replication Monitor Form as follows. When the required items are complete, click the Add Monitor button.

Domain Controller: Select the Domain Controller that will contain the replicated data.
Replicating Domain Controllers: Enter a comma separated list of Domain Controllers that replicate data from the Domain Controller entered above.
Username: Enter either the Username or entire Security Principal of a Domain Admin account. If a Username is given the default security principal is created from the root context of the Domain Controller. For Example: If you enter in Administrator for a domain controller in the yourcompany.com domain then then the entire Security Principal would be CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=yourcompany,DC=com.
Password: Enter the password for the Domain Admin account.
Maximum Replication Time: Enter the maximum amount of time for replication to occur. The monitor will go into error if any of the Replicating Domain Controllers exceed this replication time.
Update every: Select how often the monitor should read the server statistics. The default interval is to run or update the monitor once every 10 minutes. Use the drop-down list to the right of the text box to specify another update interval in increments of seconds, minutes, hours, or days. The update interval must be 15 seconds or longer.
Title: Enter a title text for this monitor. This text is displayed in the group detail page, in report titles, and other places in the SiteScope interface. If you do not enter a title text, SiteScope will create a title based on the host, server, or URL being monitored.

Advanced Options

The Advanced Options section presents a number of ways to customize monitor behavior and display. Use this section to customize error and warning thresholds, disable the monitor, set monitor-to-monitor dependencies, customize display options, and enter other monitor specific settings required for special infrastructure environments. The options for this monitor type are described below. Complete the entries as needed and click the Add or Update button to save the settings.

Disable

Check this box to temporarily disable this monitor and any associated alerts. To enable the monitor again, clear the box.

Polling Interval

The amount of time this monitor should wait between queries of the Replicating Domain Controllers. A higher number reduced the number of LDAP queries against the servers.

Path to Directory

The path to a Directory in the Active Directory that you want to monitor. This is in the form of a LDAP query. The default is based off the default Directory for this server. For example: The default for a Domain Controller for sub.yourcompany.com would be DC=sub,DC=yourcompany,DC=com.

Trace

This will turn on detailed tracing of the LDAP queries being executed. Only needed to debug problems.

Verify Error

Check this box if you want SiteScope to automatically run this monitor again if it detects an error. When an error is detected, the monitor will immediately be scheduled to run again once.

Note: In order to change the run frequency of this monitor when an error is detected, use the Update every (on errors) option below.

Note: The status returned by the Verify Error run of the monitor will replace the status of the originally scheduled run that detected an error. This may cause the loss of important performance data if the data from the verify run is different than the initial error status.

Warning: Use of this option across many monitor instances may result in significant monitoring delays in the case that multiple monitors are rescheduled to verify errors at the same time.

Update Every (on error)

You use this option to set a new monitoring interval for monitors that have registered an error condition. For example, you may want SiteScope to monitor this item every 10 minutes normally, but as often as every 2 minutes if an error has been detected. Note that this increased scheduling will also affect the number of alerts generated by this monitor.

Schedule

By default, SiteScope monitors are enabled every day of the week. You may, however, schedule your monitors to run only on certain days or on a fixed schedule. Click the Edit schedule link to create or edit a monitor schedule. For more information about working with monitor schedules, see the section on Schedule Preferences for Monitoring.

Monitor Description

Enter additional information about this monitor. The Monitor Description can include HTML tags such as the <BR> <HR>, and <B> tags to control display format and style. The description will appear on the Monitor Detail page.

Report Description

Enter an optional description for this monitor that will make it easier to understand what the monitor does. For example, network traffic or main server response time. This description will be displayed on with each bar chart and graph in Management Reports and appended to the tool-tip displayed when you pass the mouse cursor over the status icon for this monitor on the monitor detail page.

Depends On

To make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor or monitor group, use the drop-down list to select the monitor on which this monitor is dependent. Select None to remove any dependency.

Depends Condition

If you choose to make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor, select the status condition that the other monitor or monitor group should have in order for the current monitor to run normally. The current monitor will be run normally as long as the monitor on which it depends reports the condition selected in this option.

List Order

By default, new monitors are listed last on the Monitor Detail page. You may use this drop-down list to choose a different placement for this monitor.

Setting Monitor Status Thresholds

SiteScope Application Monitors allow you to set multiple threshold conditions to determine the status reported by each monitor. The individual conditions are combined as logical OR relationships so that when one or more of the conditions (for example any of the conditions for Error if) are met the monitor status is set to the applicable condition. If multiple conditions are met for more than one status condition (such as conditions for both error and for warning), the status for the monitor is set to the highest valued condition. Thus a match of an error condition and a warning condition would be reported as an error status, error being the highest value, warning the next highest and good the lowest value.

Error if: Use one or more of the selection boxes in this item to define one or more error conditions for this monitor. Use the drop-down lists in these items to change error threshold(s) relative to the the domain controllers that you have entered to check with this monitor. After choosing a domain controller or parameter, use the comparison operator drop-down list to specify an error threshold such as: >= (greater than or equal to), != (not equal to), or < (less than) and enter a comparison value in the box provided. Comparison values should be entered as whole numbers.
Warning if: Use one or more of the selection boxes in this item to define one or more warning conditions for this monitor. Use the drop-down lists in these items to change warning threshold(s) relative to the the domain controllers that you have entered to check with this monitor. Set these values relative to those you set for the error threshold in the Error if item.
Good if: You can set this monitor to return a good status for certain conditions. You may define those conditions here. Complete this item as you would for the Error if and Warning if items.