Active Directory 2016 Tuning Pack for Easy Tune launched
In case you missed it Stoyan Chalakov of POHN IT-Consulting GmbH just released a new Tuning Pack for Easy Tune!
It is live on the Easy Tune community store right now.
What is Easy Tune?
https://go.cookdown.com/ezy - if you use SCOM you will have had alert tuning pain in the past.. no longer. Easy Tune is a free SCOM alert tuning solution from us good folk here at Cookdown. Go check it out!
What is in the tuning pack?
The tuning pack contains 6 levels! There are the "Discovery only" and "MP Default" levels you get with all tuning packs that allow you to turn off everything that isnt a discovery (allowing you to tune up as needed rather than tune down) and help you tune a specific group or object to the tuning levels that the management pack author had intended (super useful!).
There are also 4 custom levels that I cannot do justice, not being an AD expert, so rather than try, here is what Stoyan himself has said about each level
Essential
This level presents a necessary minimum regarding the monitoring of Active Directory Directory Services in organizations of any scale.
All important Discoveries (Active Directory Topology, Domain Controller) are enabled. This level includes also critical Consistency, Availability and Health monitors, related to fundamental Active Directory roles and functionalities, like the FSMO roles, Global Catalogs, the Active Directory Replication, SYSVOL, Trusts, LDAP Binds as well as essential services (KDC, Netlogon, DCLocator, etc.). In addition to this the rules, which are enabled in the Essential level cover key Directory Service functionalities like User and Computer Authentication, Active Directory Web Services, DNS and different aspects of the Domain Controller Health.
This is the right choice if you would like to enable only the monitoring of the basic and most important components of your Active Directory domain(s).
Monitoring from a domain perspective is not enabled within this level.
Balanced
The Balanced Tuning Level contains all Discoveries, Monitors and Rules, defined in the Essential level and adds important performance and availability monitors (FSMO LDAP Binds, Ping performance), as well as Alert generating and performance collection rules, related to the Active Directory Database, Active Directory Web Services, the FSMO roles and many more. This level covers also the Health monitoring of all major Active Directory components - FSMO roles and their functions, the AD and SYSVOL replications, the AD database, DNS, DFS, Group Policy infrastructure, user and computer authentication and many more.
This level is the closest to the workflows (Discoveries, Rules, Monitors, etc.), which are enabled by default, when you import the Management Pack.
Monitoring from a domain member perspective covers only basic availability monitoring. Please ensure that only a few domain members (computer or member server) are allowed to do this by adding those to the following discovery "Populate AD Domain Member Monitoring Group".
Enhanced
The Balanced Tuning Level contains all Discoveries, Monitors and Rules, defined in the Essential level. In addition to that, it contains multiple performance collection rules, which collect metrics, related to the AD database, DNS, LSASS and the overall domain controller performance. This monitoring level can be used by Active Directory subject matter experts when in-depth performance monitoring or problem troubleshooting is required.
Monitoring from a domain member perspective includes all availability and performance monitoring workflows. Please ensure that only a few domain members (computer or member server) are allowed to do this by adding those to the following discovery "Populate AD Domain Member Monitoring Group".
Please enable this with caution, as this level may increase the load on your SCOM agent on the domain controllers.
Master
Compared to the Enhanced level, the Master level contains additional Active Directory database (NTDS.dit) and Asynchronous Thread Queue performance collection rules. Those are used only in special cases, when certain problems or performance issues have to analyzed and solved.
Monitoring from a domain member perspective includes all availability and performance monitoring workflows. Please ensure that only a few domain members (computer or member server) are allowed to do this by adding those to the following discovery "Populate AD Domain Member Monitoring Group".
Please enable this with caution, as this level may increase the load on your SCOM agent on the domain controllers.
Who is Stoyan?
Stoyan is a Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVP. He lives SCOM, AD, and Azure (among other things) and is a Senior IT Consultant at POHN IT-Consulting GmbH.
If you haven't come across him before, check out https://mvp.taxi/, a personal project for Stoyan and his MVP partner Drago. They aim to share the knowledge they and other MVPs have with the world.
Also, check out Stoyan's blog on the POHN website https://www.pohn.ch/blog/
Stoyan is a massive community advocate - we met at Approved's SCOM day back in Oct 2019 but he can be found almost without fail at some of the more community-focused IT Pro centric conferences in and around Europe (Experts Live EU + Switzerland come to mind)