Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Demonstration

In this section, we are going to learn how we can monitor an AD environment using OMS. Before we start, we need the following:

  • Valid OMS subscription: OMS has different levels of subscription. It depends on the OMS services you use and amount of data uploaded daily. It does have a free version which provides 500 MB daily upload and 7-day data retention.
  • Direct connection to OMS: In this demo, I am going to use direct OMS integration via Microsoft Monitoring Agent.
  • Domain administrator account: In order to install the agent on the domain controllers, we need to have domain administrator privileges.

Enabling OMS AD solutions

The first step of the configuration is to enable AD modules in OMS. We can enable it...