Azure Active Directory Connect Health for Sync Tool Released -- Redmondmag.com

Azure Active Directory Connect Health for Sync Tool Released

By Kurt Mackie
03/22/2016

Microsoft today announced that its latest tool for checking Azure Active Directory (AD) synchronization issues is now "generally available."

The new tool is called "Azure AD Connect Health for Sync." It provides monitoring capabilities for the synchronizations that occur between an organization's premises-based Active Directory and Microsoft's cloud-based Azure AD service.

Azure AD Connect Health for Sync will show the following information for IT pros, per Microsoft's announcement:

Critical failures of the sync engine
Sync operations latencies
The number of changes exported to Azure AD

Those details can be viewed in the Azure AD Connect Health portal in the form of charts. Alternatively, IT pros can use that portal to set up e-mail alerts. Role-based access control is supported, so these e-mail alerts can be configured to go to specific responsible parties.

The new tool will let IT pros track sync export latencies across specific time periods for analysis. The periods include 24 hours, 3 days or 7 days.

Azure AD Connect Health for Sync works via agents installed on Azure AD Connect servers. Azure AD Connect is Microsoft's wizard-like solution that aims to simplify sync setup issues for organizations. It's Microsoft's leading-edge sync tool, since it will eventually supplant older tools such as Directory Synchronization (DirSync) and Azure AD Synchronization.

To use Azure AD Connect Health for Sync, an organization needs an Azure AD Premium subscription. No special hardware is required. Instead, IT pros need to install the latest version of Azure AD Connect, namely version 1.0.9125 or higher. The tool then will be available after logging into the portal.

Microsoft expects to add new capabilities to its Azure AD Connect Health for Sync tool with future releases.

There's also a separate Azure AD Connect Health for ADFS tool. This latter tool is for organizations using the ADFS role of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012/R2 for federation with Azure AD. It can issue alerts, too, such as when proxy servers aren't working right.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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