Free Network Management Tools from Solar. Winds. Sponsored IT content provided by Solar. Winds There are numerous tools available to assist network managers with their day to day tasks, but most come with a cost. Here are three of the top free tools from Solar. Winds that help thousands of network managers every day. SolarWinds Import Users From AD - CSVDE Tool. Two Bonus Active Directory Tools. SolarWinds provide the CSV import utility as part of a 3-in-one free download. Bitium provides SolarWinds single sign on (SSO) and active directory integration for your small and medium businesses. Sync with AD and other LDAP directories. Here I'll share some free tools that can help simplify Active Directory (AD) administration, some of which are quite simple whereas others provide powerful. Download SolarWinds Active Directory Admin Trio and start saving time on your Active Directory management tasks today. With the Inactive User Account Removal and. Realtime Bandwidth Monitor. Solar. Winds Real- Time Bandwidth Monitor allows you to monitor interfaces on your network to see how much bandwidth is in use or how much traffic is currently on those interfaces via a constantly updating graph. And it allows you to do so at a very granular level by offering sub- second polling. With this free tool you can also monitor multiple interfaces from different devices at the same time. By setting thresholds the real- time updating graphs allow you to quickly identify which interfaces are experiencing a high percentage of utilization. Once you’ve downloaded and installed Solar. Winds Realtime Bandwidth Monitor you’ll need to enter in the IP address and the SNMP credentials or community string that you can use to query the device. Next on the string you’ll see a list of interfaces that are available for monitoring on that particular device. These are the interfaces that you’ll want to collect bandwidth data, i. You can choose to collect data on your interfaces every two minutes or even every half second. The Realtime Bandwidth Monitor is very helpful when troubleshooting application performance issues or if you’re trying to verify that you’re load balancing configuration is working correctly. IP Address Tracker. The IP Address Tracker from Solar. Winds allows you to track small and large amounts of IP addresses and subnets with ease! Monitor your IP address to see who is using a particular address and where. It’s easy to download, easy to use, and will save you time and headaches. Once you’ve downloaded and installed IP Address Tracker you will just need to click on “New Subnet” and enter in a new subnet name to track. Once you’ve done that, IP Address Tracker will start scanning all of the IP addresses in that range to tell you who’s using each IP address, how it’s assigned, and when it was last seen. This means if an IP address was used once and then hasn’t been used again for an extended period of time, you can reallocate that particular IP address. Next, start monitoring as many IP addresses and subnets as you’d like. You can mark each address as reserved, used, or assigned and note exactly what each is being used for. Once you’ve completed those steps, IP Address Tracker can start dynamically scanning for you, letting you know how many IP addresses are available at any given time. When you’ve finished with that, you can request different report formats or simply print the report out. IP Address Tracker is a great tool to manage large and small amounts of IP addresses without having to scan them into a spreadsheet and track them manually. Network Device Monitor. The last free tool on the list of favorites is FREE Network Device Monitor. Network Device Monitor makes it easy to monitor the real- time performance and health of a single device on your network with a cool desktop dashboard that sends up a bat signal when your device is in trouble. Meet our terrific trio of Active Directory Admin tools. Start saving time on those Active Directory management tasks now! These free tools help you manage. With DameWare Remote Support you can remotely manage Active Directory from one console. It’s especially valuable when monitoring devices like routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers and even servers. Once you download and install Network Device Monitor you’ll be asked for the IP address of the first device you want to monitor. You can enter in an IP address or a host name for the device. Then you’ll need to enter a name for your credentials set, i. If you’re leveraging SNMP –v. SNMP v. 3 work. Now use the test button to validate that the community string is accurate and available for the device. You can use the pre- built network device monitors that are shipped within the product. You can also go to thwack. Solar. Winds community site, and choose one of the monitors that another user has contributed. Or you can define one manually by browsing the MIBS on that device and selecting which one to monitor. An example prebuilt monitor you could choose would be the Cisco Environmental Monitor & Command State MIB. You shouldn’t need to change any values with the built in monitors, but if you’re defining from scratch by browsing from the MIB tree you may need to change from a raw value to a rate or a counter depending on what kind of information you’re trying to monitor. Then click the “Start Monitoring” button and Network Device Monitor will begin monitoring your device for that information. Solar. Winds offers over 2. IT administrators with their day to day tasks. If you like the three you’ve just learned about, take a minute to explore the others on Solar. Winds website. Tagged with Bandwidth Monitor, IP Address Tracker, Network Device Monitor, Solar. Winds, sponsored. Must- have Active Directory Tools. April 1. 4th, 2. 01. Walker Rowe. Here we list 1. AD administrator to make AD tasks easier and to ensure compliance with audit requirements. The list covers the whole spectrum of adding data via LDAP, provisioning users, managing forests and domains, querying data, and complying with audit requirements. All of these products require that you buy them unless otherwise noted. Active Directory has an LDAP interface. This means those who are comfortable using the LDAP commands ldapmodify and ldapsearch to add and query data might already be using Active Directory in that way. Softerra’s LDAP Administrator makes this easier, because it gets rid of the need to know how to spell the schema attribute when working with LDIFs. You can enter Person, Inet. Org. Person, or other objects, and it gives you a screen with all the attributes for those object types. So then you just type in the values. Softerra also makes Adaxes. This assists with user provisioning and automates some of the workflow approval processes. Plus, it provides a web interface for administrators and self- service. Adaxes lets you run queries across different AD domains even if they are in different forests. It also has a template to facilitate mass updates. For example, you can write “%firstname% %lastname% “to update the %name% property for however many records you have selected. Anturis offers a fully cloud- based monitoring application that allows you to keep abreast of your Active Directory infrastructure on a constant basis. Active Directory monitoring is but one facet of this complete cloud based IT stack monitoring system that allows you to keep abreast of multiple elements on a single dashboard that you can access from anywhere through any web browser. AD Query uses the familiar LDAP Polish notation, i. This tool is free. One of my favorite tools for working with databases or LDAP is Microsoft Access. Not enough people know about this powerful tool, which must be one reason Microsoft dropped it from Office. Now you have to buy it separately. But it is free with Office 3. Access does two very powerful things. First, it lets you make complex queries using a graphical interface. Then it writes SQL based on that for you, but you can ignore the complicated SQL. It lets you nest queries too. You would need to have some knowledge of programming to understand just how useful it is to be able to make a subset of data, to join that with another subset, and to create yet a third subset. This approach makes it possible to answer almost any question related to whatever data you have. But even the beginner can connect it to Active Directory, using ODBC, and play around with it to see how it works. Second, like all Microsoft Office products, Access includes Visual Basic, which is one of the world’s easiest and oldest programming languages (Basic was by written Bill Gates and a few others). So you can write custom logic to update fields, to make queries, or to do even more complex tasks. These two tools used together let you create templates to speed up and standardize user creation. You could say it is a mini IDM (identity management) system where AD is the . This means AD is the one system that contains all the fields and group memberships that show what other systems the user account has accounts in, and what permissions go with these accounts. Given that information, these tools can create accounts in Exchange, Microsoft Lynx, Office 3. Sales. Force. Dell sells lots of different tools for Activity Directory. Most of them, like GPOADmin, are very inexpensive. This one costs $1. USD. What GPOADmn does is to more easily manage group policy objects. For example, you can delete older versions of the object incremental changes to reduce the size of the backup. There are extensive workflow approval tools to help you comply with the requirements to document all changes to user and group permissions. You can also schedule different tasks and run them in batch mode. Replication is a key issue with any distributed LDAP system. If there are replication issues in a round- robin environment, then a newly- created user might not be able to log in right after they have created their account. This is because the authentication mechanism has consulted a different AD server than the one in which the user account was created, such that there is a replication delay or error. The Microsoft ADREPLSTATUS tool checks the status of AD replication. It shows replication errors in a domain or forest. Then it allows you to prioritize errors and export them to a CSV file for analysis, or to import to a destination domain. Manage. Engine tools are free or you can purchase them for support. ADAudit Plus tracks login activity plus changes to GPOs. So it provides the information that you need for compliance reporting. Also you could program it to flag when a user has been granted elevated privileges: this is a good indication of a hacker attack if this change was not made via the normal users or process. The importance of auditing depends on the country you are located in and the industry. The most regulated businesses are those in the financial services sector in the USA and UK. Most other businesses in the USA also have to comply with SOX and HIPAA regulations. European companies have their own set of regulations to follow. All of these require that you have an audit plan in place. Your auditor will expect you to have the tools to comply with the requirements of the plan. Sek. Chek is a tool that can help with this. Sek. Chek’s AD security evaluation reports compare your AD installation security settings to industry standards to provide a rating . Certification means documenting who gave permission to create each user account. There should be a workflow object or email that shows who gave access to each account. More complicated IDM systems do this, but you can design your own, using a combination of different tools including this one, as a more straightforward way to meet the requirement. Power Shell is for power users who don’t want to use graphical tools in all cases. Those who are comfortable with scripting languages will find the Power Shell built into Windows a good way to automate tasks. Power Shell is based on cmdlets, which are analogous to Python import modules. In other word it is a set of tools that are included at runtime. The AD cmdlet presents a comfortable and natural way to look at the AD directory tree by presenting it as a hierarchical file system. So you can use cd and dir to navigate the database. When you load the cmdlet, a drive AD: is mounted. Then you cd ad: to change over to that part of the directory.
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