And, as you know that does work well in SBSland. However, when the scale
grows, so do the requirements. IN the Medium to Enterprise space, the idea
is more along the lines of a system or series of systems pumping this type
of information into paging and making intelligent decisions based on the
audit, event, alerts, services, etc.
Which, is right where MOM 2005 drops into the picture. If it _IS_ the event
aggregator, or if it's pushing up to a bigger overall item such as HP
OpenView - that data is available. It's just that instead of getting an
e-mail per server (most admins would just begin to create a rule to send
these to DEV/NUL after a while...) MOM collects, enforces and reports this
same type of information.
Scale makes the problem much tougher, as I'm sure you can imagine....
Rick [msft]
--
Posting is provided "AS IS", and confers no rights or warranties ...
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Susan Bradley, CPA
aka Ebitz - SBS Rocks [MVP]
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 8:33 PM
To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Knowing when users were deleted.
<here she goes again.. I know ... I'm terrible at lurking>
In SBSland we have a daily monitoring email [well ... I send it daily
anyway, but it's configurable] and it looks at the event logs and tells
daily health status of my server.
Like today my email tells me my server has been running for 6 hours [just
rebooted it last night] and it gives me an overview if auto services are not
running, critical alerts and critical errors in the event logs.
It tells me memory/disk size, cpu use, top processes, if the backup ran,
and aggregates the alerts from all the log files.
It's a health mon that dumps it's data into a msde database and builds the
email to be sent internally or externally.
What it does now, is only pulls data from the one box, the SBS box. but I
can go into health mon and build my own monitors and grab those event logs
from other machines [need to so that just haven't gotten around to it].
Right now if someone [usually me] fat fingers a password, for example, it
gives me an alert in the email of the last time it occurred and how many
occurrances. Basically it's tracking the critical alerts in all the event
logs and summarizing the events along with the number of events in the email
[and showing the last time the event occurred so you can start your
investigation from that point back]
For SBS ....it's in the box, it's a gui wizard that builds this pretty
little html email that my server builds and hits me every morning at 6 a.m
and says "Hey here's how I'm doing...how are you?". It's the mid market
that doesn't have this. [and yes, we've told Mothership Redmond they need
to steal this sucker and put it in the mid market server bundle]
Does it make me more aware of events on my server? Oh you betcha it does.
Which is why this needs to be ....as you say...native in small and medium
servers....heck I'd strongly argue that no server should be shipped without
some admin somewhere getting an in your face report on that sucker.
I'll go to Frys and buy bigger harddrives if I need to. But give me a big
fat audit log file and I'm a happy camper.
Al Mulnick wrote:
I'll see your Eurocents and add raise you two. :)
I fully understand where you're coming from Ulf. Adding this information
into the DIT when it is currently possible to get is something that grates
against common sense and common engineering principles even if you
subscribe
to belts and braces methodologies.
However, I think two things make this a worthwhile request with a big
payoff. First to Laura's point about diminishing returns. I agree, at
some
point there will be diminishing returns. I also believe that as hardware
gets bigger (i.e. Standard 80 GB hard drives, 1 GB memory in workstation
machines, etc. [1]) the bar gets raised until we get to the diminishing
return. Since we're targeting 80/20 out of the box [2] it seems reasonable
that 80% of the deployments would benefit from such a change. The other 20
would be those that a) don't care or know about such things and b) those
that can't tolerate the additional overhead and therefore wouldn't want to
deploy it. I say tough pickles to them. :) Seriously, this could be on
by
default but configurable (group policy?) to disable it as a performance
issue etc.
Second, I think that the major benefit is the ability to actually get
usable
information native to the product vs. having to invest in a third party
product. Why? Because today in order to get that information I have to
have
something that scrapes the Security logs looking for such information. Is
this a good idea? I think it is. Is it something that could be native? I
think it could and should be native if technically feasible.
Making us look in a particular DC's event logs is more difficult than it
should be without yet another product. That's fine for the really large
companies that have deeper pockets, and larger needs. For the small to
medium businesses, it should not be so difficult nor should it *require*
SQL
licensing or expertise.
[1] I'm not saying that the quality has kept up, only that the hardware is
bigger, faster, stronger and cheaper.
[2] I'm making that up, but it sounds reasonable
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ulf B.
Simon-Weidner
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 4:42 PM
To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Knowing when users were deleted.
Hmm.
Do we really want to excuse prior failure of proper auditing by putting
more
data into AD? Wouldn't that lead into every request of non-configured
auditing to requests for extending the AD? Do it right the first way.
I completely agree that we should make the people more auditing aware, and
it would be great to have a centralized auditing together with some force
of
configuration instead of the per server events and auditing which is rearly
configured.
However I'm not sure if I want this kind of data in the AD.
Just my Eurocents.
Ulf
|-----Original Message-----
|From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
|[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Laura
|E. Hunter
|Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 10:28 PM
|To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
|Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Knowing when users were deleted.
|
|Various thoughts from this thread:
|
|[1] I agree with Al and Paul[1] on a desire for that sort of metadata.
|I'm not as convinced of the trade-off value of bloating the DIT for
|full undelete information, particularly in monster big environments.
|For my teeny-tiny single domain it probably wouldn't be that
|bad of a hit, but I imagine that the laws of diminishing
|returns would quickly set in.
|
|[2] Please finish the thought, Brett, I'm sure I'd find it
|helpful/enlightening/informative even if it's only speaking in
|hypotheticals.
|
|[3] It's Gil and Darren's turn to crack me up today, I guess
|joe is taking a break.
|
|
|[1] *waves* Hi Paul! Glad to see you alive post-Summit.
|
|- L
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