Active Directory, Second Edition

Monitoring Replication

The WMI Replication provider is another good example of how Microsoft is leveraging WMI to help with monitoring Active Directory. Like the Trustmon provider, the Replication provider is only available with Windows Server 2003 and is contained under the root\MicrosoftActiveDirectory namespace. It provides classes to list the replication partners for a domain controller, view the supported Naming Contexts for a domain controller, and also see the pending replication operations.

Tip

As of the time of this writing, Microsoft had not published any documentation on the Replication provider. Most of the information contained in this section was observed by one of the authors and is likely not to be the complete story!

Table 26-8 contains some of the more useful properties for the MSAD_ReplNeighbor class, which represents a replication partner (or neighbor) for a given domain controller.

Table 26-8. Useful MSAD_ReplNeighbor properties

Property	Description
IsDeletedSourceDsa	Boolean indicating whether the source DC has been deleted.
LastSyncResult	Number representing the result of the last sync operation with this neighbor. A value of 0 indicates success.
NamingContextDN	DN of the Naming Context for which the partners replicate.
NumConsecutiveSyncFailures	Number of consecutive sync failures between the two neighbors.
SourceDsaCN	CN of the replication neighbor.
SourceDsaSite	Site the replication neighbor is in.
TimeOfLastSyncAttempt	Time of the last sync ...