Chapter 20. Maintaining and monitoring Active Directory
You might think from earlier chapters that Active Directory looks after itself and that you don’t need to do much to keep it healthy. To a certain degree that’s true, but like any complex mechanism, a little bit of care and attention goes a long way. You get your car checked and serviced regularly, and Active Directory is no different in its requirements for regular health checks.
You can accomplish those checks with a little bit of monitoring and maintenance. Monitoring means keeping an eye on the system so you can spot trouble before it develops—like taking your car to the garage when the engine makes noises you don’t recognize as being normal. Maintenance is like keeping your engine’s oil levels topped up—it helps to keep things running normally and prevents bigger problems from developing.
This chapter starts by introducing you to the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) reliability workbooks. MOF is Microsoft’s implementation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), found at http://www.itil-officialsite.com/. ITIL, now in version 3, is a set of documents describing best practices in IT service management. Originally a U.K. standard, it now has worldwide adoption. The MOF reliability workbooks provide a set of recommendations for things to monitor and maintenance tasks across a number of Microsoft technologies.