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AD Event Monitoring Issues

 Keywords: AD Event Monitoring Issues 

AD Event Monitoring has always been deficient in many ways as compared to eDir Event Monitoring. Although Microsoft documents multiple mechanisms for monitoring for changes to objects, there are significant limits in either the # of objects that can be monitored or in the amount of detailed information that can be obtained when a change is detected.

I've used pretty much every mechanism available for monitoring AD for changes and none of them is really suitable for direct usage within WinBatch w/o first writing an extender that can do the work in C++ code and refine the results into something that WinBatch can easily make use of.

The DirSync LDAP server-side control is my first choice, but it returns minimal information. Specifically, it will tell you that an object has been modified since the last time you polled DirSync for modified objects, but it won't tell you any of the following things: what attribute has changed, what the old & new values for the attribute are, when exactly the attribute changed and who initiated the change in the attribute's value.

You can do some account related change monitoring using the security event log, but you have to enable a specific set of auditing settings on every DC in your domain, and you have to read the event logs from every DC or else you will have gaps in you information.

There are some very expensive 3rd party products that provide some more extensive change monitoring and auditing capabilities for AD. Quest comes to mind as the 800 lb gorilla, so to speak. As best as I can tell, the software engineers at Quest are mostly former Microsoft employees who were originally part of the AD engineering group, and they retain privileged insider information & access to AD and are able to use interfaces that are undocumented.

The most effective thing I've done for AD Event Monitoring is to use the DirSync control to get a notification when an object has been modified, and then I use that as a trigger to cause my code to read specific attributes on the object and then compare the attributes' values against prior values that I have stored outside of AD in a partial replica of the domain. This allows me to compute a delta for each attribute's value and then create "events" based on those delta values. The consumer of those events then takes action based on the particular type of object and the specific attribute that was modified.


Article ID:   W17519
Filename:   AD Event Monitoring Issues.txt
File Created: 2010:06:22:09:31:12
Last Updated: 2010:06:22:09:31:12