It is felt that In order to drive all administrative tasks effectively; there is a great demand for Active Directory. But the tasks that Active Directory performs should also be monitored on regular basis. The Active Directory monitoring task involves the updation of all the external components that are related to Active directory in order to ensure that their ongoing behavior falls within the bounds of normal, healthy Active Directory behavior. The monitoring process defines the health of Active Directory and its related components and ensures that all components follow the Active Directory rules. The rules monitor the behaviors of all the Active Directory components and immediately and automatically alert you about any unexpected behavior.

The Active Directory monitoring helps in controlling the performance and availability of the server around the network. Active Directory depends on certain critical services for proper operation. The first step in ensuring Active Directory availability is to monitor these critical services.

Active Directory Monitor monitors the following critical services

Server Service that enables the computer to connect to other computers on the network based on the SMB protocol.

File Replication Service that maintains file synchronization of file directory contents among multiple servers.

DNS Client service that resolves and caches DNS names.

Security Accounts Manager Service that signals other services that the Security Accounts Manager subsystem is ready to accept requests.

Intersite Messaging Service that is used for email-based replication between sites.

Net Logon Service that supports pass-through authentication of account logon events for computers in a domain.

Once any one of these services becomes unavailable, the Active Directory Server does not be able to perform critical tasks properly. If Active Directory resides at the center of the network, then security across the network is primarily managed via the objects and attributes contained within Active Directory. Improving the security of Active Directory and responding to external audits of Active Directory infrastructure are at the top of the matters being concerned by the administrators.

As Active Directory has a deep concern throughout the organizations, there are a number of common security concerns:

Technical staff needs to have full rights throughout the network in order to effectively manage the environment but some information should be protected from technical staff.

Multiple technical staff members don't know about each other’s tasks.

It's difficult to manage a historical view of changes to user accounts, group memberships and file system ACLs.

There's no understanding of dormant or unused accounts, or when inappropriate rights are granted via group memberships or ACLs.

There's no way for management to know when domain GPOs have been changed.

There are several Active Directory download tools available on net for free, but you may opt for the benefits which Lepide Active Directory Management & Reporting tool offers. It is an all in one solution that performs all essential functions like directory searching, user, computer, OU and schema management. Further, it also provides easy approach to generate individual reports of each object.