Carlos

Active Directory Health Checking

If there is one thing that irritates me, is always having to remember what to check when running a Active Directory health check.

What irritates me even more is the fact that I have to do all this manually. Now internally we have a tool that is provided to customers that does this. It’s an excellent tool and the guys and gals that run the tool are really skilled and I have great respect for them! Michael see you in SA I owe you a beer or ten!

But then it comes what about the guys and gals out there that have the following problem:

1. Don’t have a complete list of what to check
2. Don’t really know what to use to check these things

Well I have started a little project on my own. I have started building a Mind Map using the awesome tool MindManager (thank you Charles for giving me one of your licenses to use this wonderful product).

This tool allows you to organize your thoughts in a very cool way (below is a image of my mind map for an Active Directory Health Check. I have also attached this image to the post for those of you that want to download it to print).

I am pastionate about this as I have seen so many “Active Directory Health Checks” go oh so wrong and the incorrect things have been reported on. Working for Microsoft I have the privelage of access to great internal tools that do this for me but for you guys that don’t work for Microsoft you might be thinking we should have those to.

So I am going to be separate our task into two:

1. Define a complete (as possible) list of checks that should be done to provide a comprehensive Active Directory Health Check
2. Build the tool

Yeah I know a lot of you are thinking man building a tool is going to be a nightmare. Well yes and no :)

No-

I have most the code. For those of you that have known me I was always into building little tools to help me do my job and I have A LOT of the code that we are going to need. I even built a Network Explorer that goes out and shows your entire network to you on a GUI. That’s half the job done. Once we have the info now we have to decide what to do with it :)

Then there is the awesome .net 2.0 Framework (and I already know what Joe Richards is saying “oh no not the fat and bloated .net framework”) but the framework has a lot of the work done for us with the great information exposed to us. Why the .net 2.0 framework and not the 1.1 framework that all of you are custom to.

One main reason, I have most these tools I built them, and yes they are in .net 1.1 but getting the info in .net 1.1 is like pulling chickens teeth (it’s an English saying for those of you that are not English). Something that took me say 200 lines of code now takes three lines of .net 2.0 code to achieve.

Yes –

Well yes it is going to be a mammoth task putting all these tools together in a single tool to get all this information. But you know what – email was also a mammoth task when we released Exchange 4 and look now Exchange “12” is coming out and its got Voice recondition etc… What I am trying to get to is we have to start somewhere.

So where do we start:

1. You need to download the viewer for MindManager (don’t worry its not that bad 20mb and you will probably buy the product once you can see what it can do.)
   1. Mindjet MindManager® Viewer 6 is free software that enables you to easily view MindManager maps on your desktop. Navigate through the map by expanding and contracting branches, zooming in and out, and searching for specific words or icons. You can even follow hyperlinks to related content. Mindjet MindManager Viewer 6 (20.4 MB)
   2. I need your comments on the health check, most of you that view my blog have my email address, those of you that don’t you can leave a comment and I will get back to you :)

As we speak the awesome Ryan is setting up a Wiki so we can work in a more “modern” way and keep this project going. Once we have a comprehensive list of checks I will then give access to the people who participate to the “software tracker” database on Dirteam, and you can watch and contribute to the applications growth there.

There will be many that join and many that will fade but I have a good idea of those of you that care about things like this (hint hint Tomek and Jorge)

Anyway let the journey begin its going to be fun :)

Carlos