Part 4. Maintenance and Troubleshooting

This final section of the book is concerned with keeping your Active Directory working. It’s a fact of life that things go wrong, and when they do you need to be able to find the cause and put it right. Chapter 19 provides a set of troubleshooting techniques to help diagnose the causes of problems.

You saw some user-related troubleshooting in chapter 5. Chapter 19 builds on those techniques and supplies tests you can perform based on what you leaned in parts 2 and 3 of this book.

Ideally, you want to spot trouble before it affects the users. This is the concept of monitoring and maintenance. Chapter 20 shows how to apply what you’ve learned so that you can proactively test your AD. This will enable you to spot and fix problems before they reach your users.

Chapter 21 provides a brief overview of technologies that are related to Active Directory. You’ll meet these technologies in your career as an AD administrator and having a starting point will be useful when you need to investigate them in depth. Chapter 21 also contains your final exam.

The book ends with chapter 22 looking ahead to cloud computing.