Building a secure connected infrastructure presents enormous challenges to all MIS operations. The biggest threats in today’s network environment are vendor vulnerabilities, mis-configured software and hardware, and application flaws. It is therefore, vital that you take pro-active measures to ensure your enterprise is up and running 24x7.

Knowing where you are is the first step to getting where you want to be. A Network Health Check gives you clear, in-depth and complete visibility into your network’s vital signs. With an overall understanding of how your network functions, you can make more informed decisions for improving its performance and understand what issues are threatening availability.

Our health-check service provides global or local ADHC and prescription for network reconfiguration and network growth. As appropriate, NTSL will provide an analysis of existing network architecture, logical and physical infrastructure, issues and problems, performance and utilization. We tell you what can affect your network operations, and establish a plan for necessary changes.

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) Health Check - ADHC

In our experience, AD issues in general used to be a serious concern for us for any AD or Exchange migration, much less MIIS implementations.  That is until we started to recommend that an "AD Health Check" be mandatory before any AD dependent engagement. Since making the ADHC mandatory our clients no longer experience any project delays (outside of immediate outages) due to AD inconsistencies.  We have seen AD in some pretty poor states, but I would say DNS and replication issues are the most common.  It's our  experience that if you can solve the really big replication issues, that most of the other little problems will resolve themselves; because they were really symptoms of a much larger problem.

DNS is the key to making your AD rock-solid

Anyone familiar with Microsoft Active Directory understands the importance that the domain name system (DNS) has on all aspects of proper AD operation. AD replication depends heavily on DNS, and FRS depends on AD replication to deliver Group Policy and its associated controls and security. For these reasons, DNS is indeed the heart of Active Directory, and ensuring that it is properly configured and healthy is extremely important.

DNS structures that are patched together or not well thought out will work, but they have pockets of failure that will affect AD performance and AD-awared applications such as Microsoft Exchange. That is why adherence to best practices in the DNS structure is extremely important in creating an efficient and productive Active Directory.

We will help you assess the AD environment for DNS resolutions and AD Replications Issues, and map out an action plan.

AD Replications Health Check

With AD site topology there's now a clear delineation between the physical and logical aspects of the directory. There are a lot of ways to force replication to work in a topology, but if it isn't designed well, it will probably break.  AD replication topologies are not set in stone. It is best to fix them and eliminate the problems than to live with the problems. Compounded issues can eventually lead to unannounced denial of services and can be very difficult to troubleshoot.

To properly design your Active Directory physical structure, you need to put into consideration the following factors: location of AD services like domain controllers and DNS servers, IP addressing, WAN links between geographical sites, etc. A major Replication dependency is DNS – so that domain controllers can correctly resolve the DNS names of replication partners.

We realise that your business objectives place increasing demands on the IT staff to understand what the latest technologies can do for your business, and how to implement them in an optimised and secure way that will suit the business needs. We, at NTSL, want to help your efforts in archiving your business objectives. We specialise in Microsoft and Internet technologies, providing the best practices for essentially blue chips organisations.

We would like you to experience for yourself our mutual commitment to making your IT organization more efficient, responsive, and successful. You can be confident that you are working with one of the most knowledgeable, experienced and committed consulting team.

To prove to you that we would like to help your business drive up productivities, we are offering you half-day pre-survey site visit absolutely free. There after, our fee for a comprehensive health check services, will be dependent on the size and complexity of your network infrastructure. Please contact us today at healthcheck@ntsl.com. Tell us how we can complement your efforts.

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