So for those who don’t know, I used to be mainly an Exchange dork…ESE flowed in the veins don’t cha know?

Anyway, one of the tools that rocked (and still does) is the ExBPA and the family of Exchange Analyzers.  But did you know in Windows Server you get analyzers as well?  And some are even built into the OS?

Active Directory

The ADBPA is easily accessible in the Server Manager console in Window Server 2008 R2.  It is not, I repeat, NOT, an ADRAP, by any stretch.  But, it’s free…

DNS

has its own as well…

What else has a built-in BPA? 

It’s a secret…just kidding, I’m going to list them right here for you…

· Active Directory Certificate Services

· Active Directory Domain Services

· Domain Name System

· Internet Information Services

· Remote Desktop Services

(Above links stolen from WSiX blog here)

Basically, some of the core infrastructure parts of Server now have health monitors built in, and you can powershell them!  Why not run them once a week and dump the xml results to a directory archive?

But what, what else has a BPA?  You might ask…

GPOBPA

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2008/04/11/group-policy-best-practice-analyzer.aspx

Lync 2010

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ucedsg/archive/2011/02/18/lync-2010-best-practice-analyzer-is-now-available.aspx

SharePoint

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=cb944b27-9d6b-4a1f-b3e1-778efda07df8&displaylang=en

SBS

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940439

Hyper-V

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977238

TMG

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8AA01CB0-DA96-46D9-A50A-B245E47E6B8B&displaylang=en

SQL 2000

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=B352EB1F-D3CA-44EE-893E-9E07339C1F22&displaylang=en

SQL 2005

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=DA0531E4-E94C-4991-82FA-F0E3FBD05E63

SQL 2008 R2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0FD439D7-4BFF-4DF7-A52F-9A1BE8725591

 

All of this is free, as in beer, so check it out.  Script the collections of your core infrastructure services (or other services for that matter) and store that output.  It’s a monitor for un-documented changes ).