Performance Metrics for Active Directory
Monitoring Active Directory (AD) helps in maintaining consistent directory data and also monitor critical parameters to stay ahead of potential bottlenecks through instant alerts. The Active Directory monitor uses the Site24x7 Windows agent for monitoring. Install the Windows agent and get your AD servers auto-discovered.
Once the AD server monitor is successfully added to your Site24x7 account,
- View performance metrics for AD monitors. Log in to Site24x7 and go to Server > Microsoft Active Directory.
- Add a Threshold and Availability profile to declare a specific resource as critical or down. Go to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability (+).
- Analyze trends and identify performance issues with exclusive performance reports.
- View key metrics in a single glance with the server inventory and health dashboards, or create your own.
Interpret Active Directory Performance Metrics
- Overview: Get the AD server details, LDAP, replication, address book browses, and client sessions.
- Replication: Alleviate replication issues by gaining information on Directory and Resource Administration (DRA) services.
- Domain Services: Shows performance usages of read, write, and search operations (LDAP, SAM, DRA) to databases.
- LDAP: Prevent server overload by knowing the number of clients connected to a specific Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) session.
- Security Account Manager (SAM): Intimates other services that their subsystem is ready to accept requests.
- Databases (DB): Ensure consistent functioning of directory files and if there is enough room for the files to grow.
Overview
| Parameters | Description |
| Microsoft Active Directory Details | Gives the domain name and the forest name |
| Service Status | Status of all the AD related Windows services |
| Kerberos & NTLM Authentication | Shows the number of NTLM and Kerberos authentications per second serviced by this domain controller |
| LDAP Active Threads | The current number of threads used by the LDAP subsystem of the local directory service |
| LDAP Active Client Sessions | The number of active (currently connected) LDAP client sessions |
| DRA Inbound Synchronization Objects Remaining | The number of objects remaining until the full synchronization is completed |
| DRA Pending Replication Synchronization | The number of directory synchronizations that are queued for this server but not yet processed |
| Address Book Browses | Shows the rate at which Address Book clients perform browse operations |
| Address Book Client Sessions | Shows the number of connected Address Book client sessions |
Replication
| Parameters | Description |
| Replicated Inbound (bytes) | Shows the total number of bytes replicated in. This counter is the sum of the number of uncompressed bytes (never compressed) and the number of compressed bytes (after compression) |
| Replicated Outbound (bytes) | Shows the total number of bytes replicated out. It is the sum of the number of uncompressed bytes (never compressed) and the number of compressed bytes (after compression) |
| DRA Replication Objects | Shows the number of inbound and outbound objects received from and sent to neighbors through inbound and outbound replication respectively. |
Domain Services (DS)
| Parameters | Description |
| Read Operations: | |
| Read (%) from DRA | Shows the percentage of directory reads coming from DRA |
| Read (%) from KCC | Shows the percentage of directory reads coming from KCC |
| Read (%) from LSA | Shows the percentage of directory reads coming from LSA |
| Read (%) from NSPI | Shows the percentage of directory reads coming from NSPI |
| Read (%) from NTDSAPI | Shows the percentage of directory reads coming from NTDSAPI |
| Read (%) from SAM | Shows the percentage of directory reads coming from SAM |
| Read (%) from OTHERS | Shows the percentage of directory reads that do not come from SAM, DRA, LDAP, LSA, XDS, KCC, or NSPI |
| Write Operations: | |
| Write (%) from DRA | Shows the percentage of directory writes coming from DRA |
| Write (%) from LDAP | Shows the percentage of directory writes coming from LDAP |
| Write (%) from LSA | Shows the percentage of directory writes coming from LSA |
| Write (%) from NSPI | Shows the percentage of directory writes coming from NSPI |
| Write (%) from NTDSAPI | Shows the percentage of directory writes coming from NTDSAPI |
| Write (%) from SAM | Shows the percentage of directory writes coming from SAM |
| Write (%) from OTHERS | Shows the percentage of directory writes that do not come from SAM, DRA, LDAP, LSA, XDS, KCC, or NSPI |
| Search Operations: | |
| Search (%) from DRA | Shows the percentage of directory searches coming from DRA |
| Search (%) from LDAP | Shows the percentage of directory searches coming from LDAP |
| Search (%) from LSA | Shows the percentage of directory searches coming from LSA |
| Search (%) from NSPI | Shows the percentage of directory searches coming from NSPI |
| Search (%) from NTDSAPI | Shows the percentage of directory searches coming from NTDSAPI |
| Search (%) from SAM | Shows the percentage of directory searches coming from SAM |
| Search (%) from OTHERS | Shows the percentage of directory searches that do not come from SAM, DRA, LDAP, LSA, XDS, KCC, or NSPI |
LDAP
| Parameters | Description |
| LDAP Active Client Sessions | Shows the number of currently connected LDAP client sessions |
| LDAP Active Threads | The current number of threads in use by the LDAP subsystem of the local directory service |
| LDAP Operations | The number of writes and search operations per second performed by LDAP clients |
| Successful Binds | The number of LDAP bindings (per second) that occurred successfully |
Security Account Manager (SAM)
| Parameters | Description |
| Machine Creations | Shows the number of SAM created machine attempts per second |
| User Creations | Shows the number of SAM create-user attempts per second |
Databases (DB)
| Parameters | Description |
| Reads and Writes | The rate of database read and write operations completed |
| Cache Size | The amount of system memory used by the database cache manager to hold commonly used information from the database file(s) to prevent file operations |
| Waiting Records and Threads | Shows the number of records and threads waiting for their data to be written to the log during a database update |
| I/O Log Writes | Shows the number of times that the contents of the log buffers are written to the log |
| Average I/O Log Writes | It is the average length of time, in milliseconds, per log file write operation |
| Average I/O Database Reads | It is the average length of time, in milliseconds, per database read operation |
Performance Reports for AD
Log in to Site24x7 and go to Reports > Microsoft Active Directory. The following reports are available for AD monitoring:
- Availability Summary Report
- Busy Hours Report
- Health Trend Report
- Performance Report
Related Articles
- Add an AD server
- Other Microsoft application supported | Add a Windows monitor
- Know how server monitoring works
- Other OS platforms supported: Linux | FreeBSD | OS X
- Server performance metrics
- Troubleshooting tips