duffbeer703's questions

We're in the process of diagnosing an issue where our on-premise ADFS servers stop accepting requests from the ADFS proxy servers for short (5m intervals).

One behavior that we're having difficulty understanding is that when ADFS stops responding, Outlook client users get prompted to re-authenticate, and get disconnected when the token request times out. One suggestion was that there is some sort of network session reset, but we have been unable to identify this happening on the network path for Outlook users.

Per the documentation and Microsoft support, users are issued login tokens with a default TTL of 8 hours. If that were true, why are the users being challenged to re-authenticate?

We have a collection of about 100 Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers that I would like to start capturing Event Log data from. Many of the servers are very busy and generate large volumes of events, particularly security events that we also want to capture.

We're currently using a enterprise/expensive monitoring solution that we're reasonably happy with for system uptime and performance statistics, but the event log monitoring component is not so good.

I'm hoping to find something quick and dirty for this purpose if possible.

I recently became aware of a problem where we had a proxy configuration issue that resulted in slow performance for users browsing websites. Most of our IT folks have a slightly different config due to the way we access dev & test environments, so we ended up getting a bunch of vague "the internet is slow!" complaints before fixing it. A few months ago we had an problem where a bug in an application killed performance on many PCs... but we had a very difficult time detecting it.

This issue is bugging me, because it was something that we totally could have addressed proactively. The issue is that we have no instrumentation to know that it usually takes 5 seconds or 5 minutes to run through tasks that our users do every day.

Does anyone out there know of a free/cheap tool that would allow us to script something like this:

1. Load Internet Explorer, time the application start
2. Go to google.com, time the page load
3. Go to example.com, time the page load
4. Close browser

I'd like to be able to have a script do something like this every 15 minutes to run develop a baseline and figure out what "slow" means for users. The internet is just one example, I'd see this being useful for in-house and other applications as well.

Does anyone know of an easy way to determine the status of the BlackBerry network, outside of observing that your BlackBerry isn't working anymore or receiving email alerts from RIM?

Some of our users were affected by an outage on Sunday, and we'd like to have a way for our helpdesk staff to quickly determine whether there is an issue with RIM, or an issue with our internal BES or mail system. We do get service advisories from RIM via email, receiving email alerts when your BlackBerry isn't working can be a challenge. :)

Are there any tools out there that can torture-test and measure AD performance? We're looking at a fairly major expansion of our environment (think tens of thousands of computers) that will throw lots of transactions at our AD environment.

We suspect that we need to add hardware to our core network, but I don't want to buy hardware blindly and either waste money or hurt performance for the users.

Any ideas? I'm thinking of a tool to generate synthetic transactions, but I'm willing to accept any suggestions.