News

Azure Active Directory Tool Preview Aims at Syncing Error Reports

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/26/2016

Azure Active Directory Connect Health service now has a new Sync Error Reports preview available.

The preview lets IT pros drill down to better diagnose synchronization problems. Various problems can arise as identity data get synced from Azure AD on premises to Azure AD in Microsoft's datacenters. The new Sync Error Reports capability will check for different categories of errors, including duplicate attributes, data mismatches, data validation failures and large attribute issues. There's also an "other" category.

IT pros get an overall count of the sync errors, as well as a graphical view of the error categories. They can then click through error categories to see problem details, as well as get Knowledge Base article links.

The Sync Error Reports preview is just available to users of the Azure Active Directory Connect Health service, which is just available to Azure AD Premium subscribers. Moreover, it looks like the preview has to be used in a live production environment as it's to be used in "your active (non-staging) Azure AD Connect server," according to Microsoft's announcement.

The preview will show up in the Azure management portal for those subscribers that have the latest Azure AD Connect Health service version installed, which is version 1.1.281.0 or higher.

The Sync Error Reports preview seems to be Microsoft's latest addition to its evolving Azure AD Connect Health tool, which is designed for monitoring identity access infrastructure components. Last year, Microsoft released Azure AD Connect Health and noted it had added support for Active Directory Federation Services, a Windows Server technology that enables "federation," or single sign-on access capabilities for end users.

In November, Microsoft previewed a synchronization-checking capability in Azure AD Connect health, but it also suggested the tool would get future error checking and trends analysis capabilities. Those capabilities seemed to have come together with the new preview release.

Microsoft added the Sync Error Reports capability because IT pros were finding it too time consuming to comb through sync logs.