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AD-diagnostics in Windows Server 2008 R2

Active Directory have always been a little tricky to troubleshoot and monitor. There is a wide variety of  Performance Counters and other parameters to investigate, but this is heavy work to do manually. There is also a bunch of third party tools to do this for us but usually the price tag is big  With Windows Server 2008 a new set of tools were delivered which could be very useful when troubleshooting performance in Active Directory amongst other services. And the best of all is that they are free!

Data Collector Sets
The role Active Directory Domain Services includes a Data Collector Set intendet for Active Directory diagnostics. This can be found in Server Manager/Diagnostics/Performance/Data Collector Sets. Run the Active Directory Diagnostics for a limited time, but do not forget to stop it. A large amount of data is collected and when the job is stopped a nice and thorough report is generated.

Windows System Resource Manager
The Resource Manager is installed as a feature in Windows Server 2008. You can find it in Server Manager/Diagnostics/Windows System Resource Manager. This tool is used to allocate resources and prioritize applications or users. If there is a critical application running in the system, this tool can be used to set up a policy for this application to make sure that the system never runs out of resources.
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