Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring Active Directory Health

Some time ago I wrote a blog about monitoring Active Directory replication. A couple of days ago a friend in Slack asked me if I have anything for monitoring the entire general health of a domain controller, and not just replication.

So I researched some options, I found this blog by Adam, which was 90% of what I needed. I just wanted a script that was slightly more complete – Not just the health is important but also specific settings are.

For example; we want the replication time to be under 30 minutes, we want the recycle bin to always be active, and password complexity should be enabled everywhere. To monitor all of this, I’ve built the script below.

The Script

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33


$DiagInfo = dcdiag
$DCDiagResult = $Diaginfo | select-string -pattern '\. (.*) \b(passed|failed)\b test (.*)' | foreach {
    $obj = @{
        TestName   = $_.Matches.Groups[3].Value
        TestResult = $_.Matches.Groups[2].Value
        Entity     = $_.Matches.Groups[1].Value
    }
    [pscustomobject]$obj
}

$DCDiagStatus = foreach ($FailedResult in $DCDiagResult | Where-Object { $_.Testresult -ne "passed" }) {
    "DC diag test not succesfull on entity $($FailedResult.entity) - $($FailedResult.testname)"
}
if(!$DCDiagStatus){ $DCDiagStatus = "Healthy. No DCDiag Tests failed" }

$ReplicationSchedule = Get-ADReplicationSiteLink -filter *
$ReplicationSchedStatus = foreach ($Replication in $ReplicationSchedule) {
    if ($replication.ReplicationFrequencyInMinutes -gt 30) { "Potentional replication schedulde issue. $($Replication.name) has a replication schedulde of $($replication.ReplicationFrequencyInMinutes)" }
}
if (!$ReplicationSchedStatus) { $ReplicationSchedStatus = "Healthy - Replication Schedulde for all sites is lower than 30 minutes" }

$PasswordPolcy = Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy
if ($PasswordPolcy.complexityEnabled -ne $true) { $PasswordComplexityHealthy = "Unhealthy - Password Complexity is disabled" }else {
$PasswordComplexityHealthy = "Healthy - Password Complxity is enabled"
}

$ADRecycler = Get-ADOptionalFeature -Filter 'name -like "Recycle Bin Feature"'
if (!$ADRecycler.enabledscopes) { $ADRecyclerHealth = "Unhealthy. AD Recycle Bin Feature is disabled" } else { $ADRecyclerHealth = "Healthy - Recycle bin is enabled." }

$DCDiagStatus
$ReplicationSchedStatus
$PasswordComplexityHealthy
$ADRecyclerHealth

So load this up in your RMM, check the values of the bottom 4 variables and done. 🙂 Active Directory Monitoring made easy.

As always, Happy PowerShelling!