On October 6, 2011 I wrote about the updated Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center. Then, it was updated to version 6.0.7670.0. Today, I want to point you to another big update for the Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center: the 6.0.8070.0 update.

About System Center Operations Manager

With Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) you can leave the monitoring and alerting to software in a confident, fast and robust way. Now you can simply create an availability or replication bandwidth report by pressing a single button. No longer do you have to follow tedious routines to check up on your servers: The products in the System Center were created to do those things for you. Before Operations Manager became a part of the System Center family, it was known as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) comes with the basic set of monitoring tools to monitor Windows Servers. These basic monitoring capabilities can be extended using Monitoring Packs for specific Server Roles and Server Products. Even more, Operations Manager features an extensibility framework to allow any 3rd party developer to write Monitoring Packs. Packs have been written to manage UPS’s and even Linux hosts. Of course, monitoring is of little use in big environments with repeating errors, so System Center Operations Manager is designed to work together with the other members of the System Center family of products, like System Center Configuration Manager (formerly known as SMS Server) and System Center Orchestrator (formerly known as Opalis).

About the Active Directory Monitoring Pack

Active Directory Domain Services is a Server Role in Windows Server and Microsoft has deemed it fit to have its own Monitoring Pack. Even more, Microsoft has dedicated valuable time to actively maintain the Monitoring Pack for Active Directory.

Update

The version of the Active Directory Monitoring Pack, released on January 17th, 2013, is 6.0.8070.0 and is the seventh version of the Monitoring Pack since it’s original version (6.0.5000.0).

This update is conveniently referred to as the December 2012 revision.

What’s new in this release?

This release focuses fixing problems reported by customers. The accompanying guide mentions:

• Added Windows Server 2012 Support
• Product Knowledge improvements
  • Client Monitoring alerts identify problematic Domain Controllers in the description.
  • Inter-domain trust alert identifies which trust is broken in the alert description.
  • More specific action recommendations added to alert for “Could not determine FSMO role holder” and alert for “Domain Controller’s Ops Master is inconsistent.”
  • KnowledgeBase article information added to alert for “The Active Directory database is corrupt.”
  • KnowledgeBase article information added to alert for “Two replication partners have an inconsistent view of the FSMO role holders.”
  • Some rules with names that begin “Client Side script…“ but were not actually executed by client-side monitors were renamed.
  • More specific action recommendation added to description for Event ID 1000.
• Excessive alert fixes
  • A duplicate alert that appears when a computer authentication fails was removed.
  • Repetitive alerts for UserEnv and Netlogon were replaced with a single alert that includes a count of the number of occurrences.
  • The alert for the number of allowable replication partners was increased from 100 to the maximum number of replication connections.
  • The alert of FSMO role holder availability was refined so that it is issued less frequently in cases where operations master role holder is temporarily unavailable.
  • Active Directory processor overload monitor was removed because it duplicates an existing monitor in the operating system management pack.
  • Duplicate alerts for KDC errors and trust verification failures were removed.
  • Informational alert was disabled for rule “The default security settings for the NTFS file systems have not been applied to Active Directory directory folders.”
• Script error fixes
  • Multiple script errors were fixed to improve Active Directory site topology discovery, DNS verification, operation master role discovery, and other improvements.
• Rule error fixes
  • Multiple rule errors were fixed to improve error handling, event logging, and server state reporting.

Download

You can download the update here.

Further reading

New Version: Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center
[OpsMgr 2007 R2] Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center
MP versions and release dates
[SCOM] Mise à jour (6.0.8070.0) du pack d’administration Active Directory
Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center 6.0.8070.0