Regular monitoring is of your active directory infrastructure is the key to good replication maintenance and overall system health. Since our focus today is on Replication, we will look at two very useful tool windows server Repadmin.exe and dcdiag.exe which both form part of the Windows server Support Tools.

The directory service event log which is accessible through the Event Viewer is also a key tools for monitoring Active Directory Replication replication.

Repadmin is a command-line tool that report failures on a replication link between two replication partners. The following repadmin example displays the replication partners and any replication link failures for Server1 on the yarticle.com domain:

repadmin /showrep  server1.yarticle.com

For a complete list of repadmin options, use the ? option:

repadmin /?

 Dcdiag is a command-line tool that can check the DNS registration of a domain controller, check to see that the security descriptors (SIDs) on the naming context heads have appropriate permissions for Active Directory Replication replication, analyze the state of domain controllers in a forest or enterprise . The following dcdiag example checks for any Active Directory Replication replication errors between domain controllers:

dcdiag /test:replications

For a complete list of dcdiag options, use the ? option:

dcdiag /?

The directory service log found in the Event viewer reports replication errors that occur after a replication link has been established.