Inventory of the Active Directory

The most important thing in brief:

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Inventorying the Microsoft Active Directory Services (ADS) takes you a significant step further in documenting your IT network. This database contains a lot of information that is an integral part of every good IT documentation. It is possible to retrieve user accounts, groups, contacts, computers, organisational units and the actual AD structure. For detailed instructions please refer to the Docusnap manual. One of the reasons why collecting this data is of fundamental importance is so that access rights and shares in your network can be assigned to a user account.

Comprehensive scan of the Active Directory database

Inventorying the Active Directory database also means obtaining a detailed graphical overview of your network’s layout. Creating graphical evaluations gives you access to overview plans at any time. In Docusnap, this can be done at the push of a button, using predefined templates. You should always include these graphics in your IT manual, which will save you a lot of time as you won’t have to create any graphics manually, but can update them with the latest data at any time. In addition, you’ll have access to various information which might otherwise be forgotten. For example, you’ll see instantly how the FSMO roles of your ADS are distributed. You’ll be able to create overviews in the form of Active Directory plans, domain plans, and site plans at the push of a button, which are all graphics that would take a lot of time and effort to create manually.

There is even the possibility of scanning group policies, which are stored in the data structure under organisational units in Docusnap. In order to scan group policies, you need to specify a computer in the Docusnap inventory wizard where the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) is installed. Not all information can be retrieved from the Active Directory database, however. If you’re hoping to document account passwords, this won’t work of course as this kind of information can’t be inventoried in this way.

Scheduling helps with updating

Enable Scheduling for the inventory of the Active Directory. Information should be gathered and archived on a daily basis. Since the membership of users to a certain group is documented for the purpose of assigning rights, this information should be kept for a while. The automatic update won’t create more work for you as you can use the integrated scheduling feature of the Docusnap server. In addition, you’ll have access to information which will help you answer relevant questions such as who had access to a specific directory at a specific time. You’ll certainly be able to answer this and other questions with the help of this inventory data.

A lot of information that isn’t shown in the management console will be queried. You’ll be surprised about the amount of information that will be available to you. Don’t worry, your IT manual will be filled – filled with valuable information.