How to enable Active Directory diagnostic logging

Active Directory is the fundamental of Exchange Server 2000 to Exchange Server 2003. Most of the time, lots of Exchange problems is due to Active Directory. Recently, one of our customer, Exchange is down due to AD- which take about 3 days to solve!

First, event viewer is the best place to start troubleshooting - this method started far from Windows NT4. Good thing about Active Directory, the diagnostic level can be adjustable!

Before go into increasing diagnostic logging, you have to ensure that your DC is ready to increase some overhead filling up logs in faster rate.

Can you perform in GUI, not we know for now - maybe there is. Find it in Internet.

What we are going to share is how to enable using registry key - PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU PERFORM BACKUP on your system state before continue from here.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Diagnostics

In this key, you will be able to see quite a number of registry key for AD. Example: Backup, KCC++

The default value for the key is 0 - which is minimum. you can increase the number for the key from 0-5 where

1 - Minimal
2 - Basic
3 - Extensive
4 - Verbose
5 - Internal

Normally, we will advice you to increase to 3 for the particular service you would like to troubleshoot. Slowly to 5. 5 menas log EVERYTHING! Then you will be able to gain the record in Directory Service log.

Once you get a clue on how to solve a problem, REMEMBER to turn it back to 0.