On the Enterprise Manager Console’s Home page, select Microsoft Active Directory in the drop down list in the Target Search section and click the Go button.

If you only have one Microsoft Active Directory instance in your enterprise, the Home page for that instance will appear. Else, click any one of the listed Microsoft Active Directory instances.

The Home page, similar to any other home page within the Grid Control Console, provides an at-a-glance view of the health and performance of Microsoft Active Directory. From this page, you obtain the target’s status, availability over time, outstanding alerts, and access to additional Active Directory details via various drilldowns. Also from the Home page you can view alerts for the host on which Microsoft Active Directory resides, or you can drilldown to the host itself to obtain further detail on the host's availability and performance. Such integration enables you to easily and quickly correlate performance problems between middleware software and the Microsoft operating system on which it runs. Click the All Metrics link in the Related Links section to get an idea of the depth of performance monitoring Grid Control offers for Microsoft Active Directory.

On the All Metrics page, you can see the various metric categories that Grid Control monitors - Address Book, Directory Replication Monitoring, Directory Service, Latest Errors and Warnings, Response, Lightweight Directory Access (LDAP), etc. Over 180 performance metrics are monitored and/or collected. Click the plus (+) sign next to Directory Service to expand it. Click the Directory client binds/sec link to understand the load on the domain controller.

From the metric details page that appears, you can see various statistics concerning this metric as well as a graphical view of its values in real-time, historical, or your own customized timeframe and how the values compare with defined thresholds. Alert history is also provided to track past problems and comments/details about them. Select Custom from the View Data drop down list.

Select relevant Start Date and End Date and click the OK button.

If you are trying to diagnose a problem within a certain time range, you can view any metric detail pages within that custom time range to help pinpoint problems. From the metric details page that appears, you can now see the values of the metric for the time range you specified.

Similarly you can drilldown into other metrics that interests you.

From the Microsoft Active Directory home page, click the Reports property page.

Here you see the default report for Active Directory Read/Write/Search Operations Percentage. This report shows a pie chart with the percentage of operations performed on the directory database by various components or processes (such as DRA, LSA).

Click the View Report drop-down. You see a list of reports that are provided out-of-box for Active Directory. There are 10 pre-defined reports. They summarize key performance, and usage information.

Select the the Directory Service Read/Write/Search Operations Rate/Sec Statistics report. This report informs you of the peak load times for the active directory.

Select the Directory service LDAP performance statistics report. Like this, you can view all the available reports. In addition to being available on the Active Directory home page, these reports are also available from the "Reports" tab. You can take advantage of Enterprise Manager's powerful reporting capabilities, to customize out-of-box reports to fit your operational needs, share reports with all types of business users, and schedule report generation.

Click the Home property page to navigate back to the home page.

Click the Reports link in the Related Links section.

The reports listed here include all reports in which Active Directory appears – those identified above as well as others such as Availability History (Target) or Outstanding Alerts and Policy Violations (Target).

Return to the Microsoft Active Directory home page by clicking the Back button in the Web browser.

Enterprise Manager automatically collects configuration information for Microsoft Active Directory, including directory service replication, file replication service, and group policy settings. By default, this information is collected every 24 hours, but you can force the collection of new data any time by clicking the Refresh button on this page. From this page you can also view configuration history by clicking the History button, compare configurations between Active Directories by clicking the Compare or the Compare Multiple button, or take a snapshot of the current configuration by clicking the Save button.

Click the History button.

This page shows all of the configuration changes that occurred on the Active Directory since Enterprise Manager started monitoring it. You can further drill down to see the details for each change. Having this information easily accessible will assist you in diagnosing why there is poor performance.

In the Groups page, click the Plug-ins group to go to its home page.

The Plug-ins group contains a number of different plug-ins, including Microsoft Active Directory. The group home page presents administrators with summary of the status, alerts and policy violations across all of the members of the group. Click the Charts property page.

When defining groups, administrators have the ability to include summary charts, which allow them to analyze collective performance of the group members. Here we can see different charts, displaying highest average/ lowest average/or statistical information across targets in the group.

Click the Launch Dashboard button.

System Monitoring Dashboard provides administrators with a near real-time view of open alerts against members of the group. The color-coded interface highlights problems using universal colors of alarm - red for critical issues, yellow for warning alerts, and green for normal conditions. The System Monitoring Dashboard significantly reduces the complexity of monitoring groups of system.

In this section you looked at how Groups functionality can be applied to Microsoft Active Directory, just like to any other Enterprise Manager managed target. Similarly, you can use familiar monitoring features, such as alerts, notifications, blackouts, and monitoring templates for Active Directory monitoring.

Notice that the Loan Application Service is down. Click the Loan Application Service link to navigate to its home page to obtain more details on this down service.

From the service's home page, you can immediately see a possible cause of service failure, there is a problem with one of the databases supporting the service. You can drilldown further to obtain more details. Click the Topology property page on the service home page.

Loan Application Service is an aggregate service, consisting of multiple sub-services. In the Topology page, you see all of the infrastructure components that individual sub-services are relying on. You see visual indication of the root cause of service failure in red.

Plug-ins such as Active Directory appear as part of the topology of the service. By bringing plug-ins into Enterprise Manager, you can now perform comprehensive service modeling and view the entire service topology. In addition, you can identify or exclude plug-ins as a cause of service failure. In this case, Active Directory is not the cause of service failure.