New MP - Active Directory Management Pack 6.0.7670.0

As new Operations Manager is coming, Microsoft decided to revamp and update whole bunch of main Management Packs to comply with new architecture of OpsMgr 2012 and fixing bugs reported by users. So at the end of the day in Europe, MS team has just released an updated version of Active Directory Management Pack 6.0.7670.0.

Is it worth?

Yes, although you have to be sure that Marnix Wolf, Kevin Holman or other popular MVPs will post bugs found in that one (as it happened in OS MP – details here). Let’s check what’s new inside. Below is an outtake from official AD MP Documentation:

• Fixes to problems reported by customers:
• Active Directory databases larger than 4 GB reported incorrectly.
• 20% of the alerts are not triggered due to wrong event ID mapping.
• Performance data is not collected due to wrong event ID mapping.
• Performance counter selected by default is wrong.
• Time skew alert is not triggered due to script defect.
• Operation master monitor is broken due to script defect.
• Frequent operation master alert description misspelled.
• Fixes to architectural issues to facilitate future System Center Operations Manager releases:
• Discovery interval for client perspectives set to larger values.
• Discovery scheduler class is used on several discoveries.
• Views target a custom AD DS MP class instead of System.Entity.
• Reports target a custom AD DS MP class instead of System.Entity.
• Some discovery targets will not change Properties.

Now – what the… 20% of alerts where not triggered due to mistakes in code? That’s a shame. You know why? Because previous update was 2 years ago! No one cared for two years about that Management Pack, maybe they’ve send updates by MCS, but hello! Normal users would like to have that too! More detailed information below:

Fix	Impact
Active Directory databases larger than 4 GB reported incorrectly	This prevents incorrect logging of Event ID 333 with the following text:AD Database and Log : Free space (KB) on drive  is lower than the required reserved space for AD Log file. It should be at least 200000 KBytes.
20% of the alerts are not triggered due to wrong event ID mapping	This prevents several event-driven rules from breaking due to using the old event sources from Windows Server 2003 in their event rules rather than the new event sources for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Performance data is not collected due to wrong event ID mapping	Prevents the following alert caused by rules that fail to collect performance data on domain controllers that run Windows Server 2008:In PerfDataSource, could not find counter NTDS, DRA Inbound Bytes Not Compressed (Within Site)/sec, in Snapshot. Unable to submit Performance value. Module will not be unloaded.
Performance counter selected by default is wrong	Fixes problems that prevented Replication Latency Performance data from appearing.
Time skew alert is not triggered due to script defect	Matches the names of arguments in a function in AD_Time_Skew.vbs to variables passed to LogScriptEvent to enable events related to time skew to be created as designed.
Operation master monitor is broken due to script defect	Corrected a variable name in the Discovery script so the DNS Naming Master property is discovered correctly for proper Operations Master Consistency monitoring.
Frequent operation master alert description misspelled	Corrected misspelling of “inconsistent.”
Discovery interval for client perspectives set to larger values	Discovery interval for client perspectives had an interval set too high, which could cause performance issues that could block installation of an updated management pack.
Discovery scheduler class is not used on several discoveries	Some workflows use System.Scheduler instead of System.Discovery.Scheduler.
Views target a custom AD DS MP class instead of System.Entity	This could have blocked installation of an updated management pack.
Reports target a custom AD DS MP class instead of System.Entity	This could have blocked installation of an updated management pack.
Some discovery targets will not change Properties	This problem could cause bad performance for organizations with many domain controllers.

So as the console was still open, I’ve decided to check, how is it going. You can import it via Management Pack Catalog from Import Management Pack wizard.

As you see… [ekhm]… misspellings where corrected

There are more changes to scripts, monitor roll-ups and there are some undocumented overrides for Read-Only Domain Controllers, so please check the whole documentation. After importing the MP – nothing happened. My console is still alive, alerts are ok, performance is ok. Going to look for mistakes now

Download the NEW AD Management Pack!

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