Acitve Directory monitoring

Question

Can NPM 9.1 be utilized for the monitoring of specifc Active Directory objects?

Domain Groups, 
Group Policies, and
OUs.

I would like alerts for any modifications for named administrative groups, like: Enterprise, Schema, Administrator, Backup, etc.   With this feature a audit report should be able to be generated from NPM.

Group Policies.
  An alert including: Group Policy name, Domain, and Edited by:.  A weekly/monthly summary report to follow.
The specifics of the edit may be asking to much and un-needed because there are MS tools to automate the download / backup GPO already.

OUs
 I would like alerts when specific OUs are modified. When and by whom.  A scheduled weekly / monthy summary report to follow.

This would go a long way for system auditing and regulatory compliance.  Personally it would stop those annoying late night calls resulting from a local admin "tweeking" something ...  I over-see a mid-sized, muti-organizational, 4 tier structure, each have a local admin group.  So dad needs to know what the children are changing.

We did have an application from "another" monitoring organization; budgets being what they were I needed to make a decision what I needed versus wanted.  We kept Solarwinds, now I am hoping the viod can be filled.

If some other thwack contributors are currently monitoring and reporting on AD changes, I would really appreciate your input.

FormerMember · Answer

There are already AD templates on thwack in the Content Exchange.  There will be a built-in AD template in APM 2.5, which is out shortly.  These generally monitor the health of a domain controller.

To monitor more, you don't need to write any programs.  You can use AppBuilder to browse to the DC and view a list of the WMI Performance Counters.  You check the ones that have the info you need and APM will monitor them.

If you want to monitor more info than is available from WMI is probaby getting into fairly deep AD monitoring and may require using scripting to get that data.  But, really, in AD, most things are published as WMI.

FormerMember · Answer

There are already AD templates on thwack in the Content Exchange.  There will be a built-in AD template in APM 2.5, which is out shortly.  These generally monitor the health of a domain controller.

To monitor more, you don't need to write any programs.  You can use AppBuilder to browse to the DC and view a list of the WMI Performance Counters.  You check the ones that have the info you need and APM will monitor them.

If you want to monitor more info than is available from WMI is probaby getting into fairly deep AD monitoring and may require using scripting to get that data.  But, really, in AD, most things are published as WMI.

rcahill · Answer

I appreciate that input.

Being a humble engineer that is relying "on NPM for enterprise-class fault & performance management" and not a programmer. I would not know how to go about getting that information.

I generally try to rely on proven tools and applications to acquire that level of data.  Not roll my own, some of these forum readers are well versed in application programming or SQL.  They are not my particular strengths, I struggle with vbs.

I'll be happy to try and learn a little; but assistance would be reqiured.  I will point out that the greatest and longest-term benefit to this development effort would be to Solarwinds corp. not my organization.  "Monitor your Active Directory environment with SolarWinds new Network Performance Monitoring AD tool-sets."  Could see it on the splash screen.