Christos Polydorou

Following the last OMS article about the update management solution, I would like to show you two more, this time about Active Directory. The Active Directory Health Check solution provides information on many aspects of your Active Directory environment such as Security, Compliance, Business Continuity and Performance. Each group performs a number of checks against the logs, to find possible issues. Good news, apart from the backup issue, my AD is looking great!!! The second solution I'm using for Active Directory is AD Replication Status. It examines the domain controller logs and provides useful insights on the health of the replication of your Active Directory environment. I've left the DC4 domain controller on my lab disconnected from the network on purpose in order to create replication issues. Replication between DC3 and DC4 is broken, since the servers hadn't communicated for a while. Those two solutions can save you from a lot...

Now that we have configured our first agent to send data to the OMS workspace, how do we know that everything is working as it should? The first place to check the status of the agent is the agent itself. Open the Control Panel and search for the Microsoft Monitoring Agent. If you switch to the Azure Log Analytics tab, the status of the agent is shown as following: In case you need more details about the status of the agent and it's operations, events are written to the Operations Manager event log: The last way to check the connectivity of an agent to the workspace is to query the heartbeat logs on the workspace itself. The agents send heartbeat messages to the workspace and those messages are available to query. Here we see that the OMSGateway.lab.local computer has sent a heartbeat message on 2018-03-22 at 16:00 GTM. The IP address of the computer is also available along with the type and version of operating system and agent and other useful information. Th...