7.9 Analyzing GPO Infrastructure Status

The GPO Infrastructure Status report provides information about whether the domains and GPOs in a domain are synchronizing consistently. This is a very useful report to run before performing any other tasks involving a GPO or domain.

7.9.1 Generating the GPO Infrastructure Status Report

To generate the GPO Infrastructure Status report:

  1. Log on to a GPA Console computer with an account that has domain user and Active Directory read access permissions.

  2. In the GP Explorer, select the domain or GPO for which you want to generate a report.

  3. Click the Infrastructure Status tab on the right pane.

  4. If you want to change the baseline domain controller that will be used as the reference domain controller for generating the report, click Change DC.

  5. Click Get Status on the right pane.

7.9.2 Checking the Results of the GPO Infrastructure Status Report

To validate the synchronization consistency of the GPOs, GPA compares the Group Policy information stored in Active Directory, and it separately compares the Group Policy information that is stored in SYSVOL on all the domain controllers in the selected domain.

GPA performs the following comparisons:

  • Report AD Creation Date Details

  • Report AD Modification Date Details

  • Report AD ACL Details

  • Report AD Version Details

  • Report AD GPO Count Details

  • Report Sysvol Creation Date Details

  • Report Sysvol Modification Date Details

  • Report Sysvol ACL Details

  • Report Sysvol Version Details

  • Report Sysvol GPO Count Details

  • Report Sysvol Hash Details

During the report generation process, if GPA cannot contact a GPO, or if a GPO is found to not be consistent, the GPO in question is added to the Domain controller(s) NOT in Sync list under the Status Details section of the Infrastructure status tab.