Azure AD Connect Health with AD DS is now in preview!

You’ll need Azure AD Premium for this, but it’s a little agent that gets installed on each of your domain controllers and provides health and alerting via Azure AD Connect Health.

The service is a light health and monitoring solution which reports back on some basics such as these:

Also, it will show any replication issues and other DC related problems for you to re-mediate. You can also configure email alerts, so you know when a problem is detected, rather than relying on checking the health page to notice something.

The setup of Azure AD Connect Health with AD DS is incredibly easy – download and install the agent (check you meet the prerequisites first!), use credentials of an Azure AD global administrator (set up a service account for this), and you’re done. If you install it on a server that doesn’t have the required Windows Server roles, you’ll get an error such as ” Microsoft.Identity.Health.Common.RoleNotFoundException: No role was registered. “

The two other currently Health services are for ADFS and Azure AD Connect, so check those out too if you haven’t already.

One issue I had after installing was that I couldn’t see the box for Active Directory Domain Services in the Azure portal, it was just blank:

After trying to work out why for a while, @kengoodwin pointed out that I should try resetting the view. This is done by clicking one of the ‘Add tiles’ options, then at the top of the screen choosing hte ‘Restore default’ option.

Doing this resulted in my tiles showing as they should – I’d never made adjustments to my tiles, but had previously gone into edit mode and saved the zero changes I did, which I believe stopped the portal from adding in the new tiles once the new health service was detected. This is how it should look:

Much better!

If you have Azure AD premium, then check out this free extra!