AD Replication Status Tool is Live

[Ned Pyle]

First published on TechNet on Aug 23, 2012
Hey all, Ned here with some new troubleshooting tool love, courtesy of the ADREPLSTATUS team at Microsoft. I’ll let them do the talking:

The Active Directory Replication Status Tool (ADREPLSTATUS) is now LIVE and available for download at the Microsoft Download Center .

ADREPLSTATUS helps administrators identify, prioritize and resolve Active Directory replication errors on a single DC or all DCs in an Active Directory Domain or Forest. Cool features include:

• Auto-discovery of the DCs and domains in the Active Directory forest to which the ADREPLSTATUS computer is joined


• “Errors only” mode allows administrators to focus only on DCs reporting replication failures


• Upon detection of replication errors, ADREPLSTATUS uses its tight integration with resolution content on Microsoft TechNet to display the resolution steps for the top AD Replication errors


• Rich sorting and grouping of result output by clicking on any single column header (sort) or by dragging one or more column headers to the filter bar. Use one or both options to arrange output by last replication error, last replication success date, source DC naming context and last replication success date, etc.)


• The ability to export replication status data so that it can be imported and viewed by source domain admins, destination domain admins or support professionals using either Microsoft Excel or ADREPLSTATUS


• The ability to choose which columns you want displayed and their display order. Both settings are saved as a preference on the ADREPLSTATUS computer


• Broad OS version support (Windows XP -> Windows Server 2012 Preview)

ADREPLSTATUs UI consists of a toolbar and Office-style ribbon to expose different features. The Replication Status Viewer tab displays the replication status for all DCs in the forest. The screenshot below shows ADREPLSTATUS highlighting a DC that has not replicated in Tombstone Lifetime number of days (identified here by the black color-coding)


Click me

Using the Errors Only button, you can filter out healthy DCs to focus on destination DCs reporting replication errors.


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The Replication Error Guide has a Detected Errors Summary view that records each unique replication error occurring on the set of DCs targeted by the administrator.


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Close up of the Detected Errors Summary view.


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Selecting any of the replication error codes loads the recommended troubleshooting content for that replication error. The TechNet Article for AD Replication Error 1256 is shown below.


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The goals for this tool are to help administrators identify and resolve Active Directory replication errors before they cause user and application failures, outages or lingering objects caused short and long-term replication failures, and to provide administrators greater insight into the operation of Active Directory replication within their environments.

The current version of ADREPLSTATUS as of this posting is 2.2.20717.1 (as reported by ADREPLSTATUS startup splash screen).

Known Issues

Status

ADREPLSTATUS will not work when the following security setting is enabled on the operating system:

• System cryptography: Use FIPS 140 compliant cryptographic algorithms, including encryption, hashing and signing algorithms

Known issue and by design.

Symptoms
ADREPLSTATUS fails to launch on highly secure computers.	Extra checkmark appears at bottom of column chooser when right clicking on a column header

Support

• ADREPLSTATUS is a read-only tool and makes no changes to the configuration of, or objects in an Active Directory forest


• The ADRPLSTATUS tool is supported by the ADREPLSTATUS team at Microsoft. Administrators and support professionals who experience errors installing or executing ADREPLSTATUS may submit a “problem report” on the following web page:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12707.active-directory-replication-s...

• If the issue is known, the ADREPLSTATUS team will reply to this page with the status of the issue. The status field will be listed as “known issue”, “by design”, “investigating”, “In progress” or “resolved” with supporting text


• If a problem requires additional investigation, the ADREPLSTATUS team will contact you at the email address provided in your problem report submission


• ETA for problem resolution will depend on team workload, problem complexity and root cause. Code defects within the ADREPLSTATUS tool can typically be resolved more quickly. Tool failures due to external root causes will take longer unless a work-around can be found


• The ADREPLSTATUS team cannot and will not resolve AD replication errors identified by the ADREPLSTATUS tool. Contact your support provider, including Microsoft support for assistance as required. You may also submit and research replication errors on:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winserverDS/threads/

Until next time,

Ned “repple depple” Pyle

[Webhalla]

The download in https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30005 will not upgrade ADREPLSTATUS to version 1.1 and the license file is not renewed so the program alerts that it wil stop running in 8 days. I use this program every work day to check for Microsoft Active Directory replication failures as it replaces replmon from the server 2003 resource kit that will not install on clean Windows 10 systems. (it continues to run on upgraded systems from Windows 7)

I even tried installing it as domain admin, local admin, admin rights and the msiexec tool. Even rebooting between uninstall and install. The license file the download above creates, will not prolong the license period for this free tool.

Now you have a fast, free and graphical tool for analysing Active Directory replication, it fails on a license file. :(

[khalidq]

I ran the tool for a domain, I am not able to understand  highlighted source DC or Destination DC have problem.

[M3KSG]

Hello there,

Has anyone been able to successfully run this tool on a Windows 11 system?  I have not been able to run this tool on a Windows 11 Enterprise system.

Regards,

M3KSG

[Marc Laflamme]

@M3KSG If the issue is about the certificate then there was a workaround posted on Reddit a few months ago that let you get around it. First reply from Brandhor has the fix.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/xpfune/ad_replication_status_tool_broken_again_in_early/

[M3KSG]

@Marc LaflammeThank you so much for sharing the link.  This was very helpful.  The application open now.  I will test further.  Thanks again.

[Marc Laflamme]

@M3KSG Glad to hear it helped you!

[Marc Laflamme]

@M3KSG @khalidq @Webhalla 

Ryan Ries is currently working on rebuilding this tool here https://github.com/ryanries/ADReplStatus

Might be worth following.

[Webhalla]

@Marc Laflamme Looks great that there is new development for this valuable tool. Thank you @Ryan Ries ! Who ever thought @microsoft that time limited licenses in essential Active Directory debugging software and then stop supporting it was a good idea ;) They started integrating this functionality in Azure Active Directory, but an onprem checker still remains valuable. I will update my website accordingly. (The ICT-Hotlist. Information about:Finally a ReplMon replacement from Microsoft [https://www.vansoes...)