If you are monitoring your ActiveDirectory infrastructure with Dynatrace - please read on carefully. There's an action required.
Why new AD extension
Existing two AD monitoring extensions have been developed over the course of past two years, with great feedback from the Community. Although we consider them functionally complete (well, OK, complete-enough), we recognize that especially the Active Directory services extension faces scalability challenges in very large environments. While working on these challenges, we realized that the surest way to address these is to move away from the generic WMI data source and adopt Python data source as the vehicle of scaling it up.
We tested this approach, and it proved to work as we wanted. Moving forward with it would mean that we will land with two Python-based AD extensions, so the decision was simple: merge them into a single one: this way the Python-based version of the Active Directory services and Active Directory extended monitoring became a single extension.
Benefit: less is more. Single AD extension does it all and is easier to maintain than two extensions.
Why migrate
Better scalability, stability, easier troubleshooting, transparent and easy to manage security settings - these benefits justify the migration effort. We created this new extension driven by your feedback on hurdles of adopting two separate extensions and challenges of managing a privileged user account for the AD extended monitoring extension. These hurdles have been eliminated.
In addition to benefitting simplicity and scalability of the new AD extension, migration is a must because we don't plan to maintain the previous AD extensions for long. They continue to work, and we support them, but migrating off them will eventually become a necessity: any bug fixes or enhancements will be committed to the new extension. This means that Support may offer migration as the only way to address an issue you may encounter in the future with the old extensions. Therefore, plan migration in advance to save on unnecessary urgency.
When to migrate
Start the migration planning now. Please note that the new extension requires OneAgent 1.305+, so make sure migration occurs only when required OneAgent version has already been adopted.
What to expect from the migration
Elevated user permissions need to be granted to this new AD extension in OneAgent configuration. Take it into account when planning. See Microsoft Active Directory Monitoring hub tile for details.
What to expect after migration
Migration effectively means adopting a new extension and stopping using previous ones. This in turn means that monitoring configurations have to be recreated and new metric IDs may mean you need to recreate your AD dashboards.
Those who couldn't adopt AD Extended Monitoring extension because of privileged account hurdle, will now benefit from insights into a number of important AD performance signals, like AD replication status, DHCP server status and performance, time synchronization, LDAP BIND performance, ATQ thread usage, FSMO consistency, AD database disk usage, and more.
What's next
Consult Microsoft Active Directory Monitoring hub tile for details and plan migration in your environment. Ask questions in this thread - developers of the AD extensions will be glad to advise you on the next steps.
