News
Quest Ships Spotlight on Active Directory 3.0
Quest Software chose the recent Microsoft Management Summit to announce shipment of the latest update to its Spotlight on Active Directory product.
Quest Software
chose the recent Microsoft Management Summit (see http://mcpmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=
for a related announcement) as the venue to announce shipment of the latest
update to its Spotlight on Active Directory product. The Spotlight series
of software provide diagnostics and monitoring for a variety of server
software. In this case, the product can help you manage all of your Active
Directory servers and their topology. As with the rest of the Spotlight
products, Spotlight on AD is designed to not just catch errors, but to
help you determine their root causes. If the software sees a server responding
slowly to replication traffic, for example, you can drill in and find
out what's going on.
The big news in this version is a new interface dubbed the Topology
Viewer. The Topology Viewer shows all of your AD sites and servers, and
the links between them. You can see the routes that replication traffic
is taking, force replication across any particular link, and even reconfigure
the AD topology from here. This screen looks like an impressive management
tool for AD infrastructure, which can grow fearsomely complex to try to
understand without graphics.
In addition to directory replication, you can also use the Topology Viewer
to see how file replication and time synchronization are functioning.
For any given server you can also view an entire screen of diagnostic
information that includes LDAP sessions, LSASS and NTFRS funtioning, the
size of the AD store, CPU usage, location of the FSMO roles, and more.
Quest is targeting this product at the senior administrators and architects
who need to understand the entire AD structure across an enterprise, as
well as those who have to maintain AD deployments.
In addition to the diagnostic and troubleshooting features, Spotlight
on AD can also help to educate staff on how AD works by showing graphically
what's going on in all those servers.
The product is priced at $1495 per managed domain controller. It's shipping
now, and you can download a 30-day evaluation copy from the Quest web
site.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.