Measures reported by ADReplQueueTest

As the domain controller formulates change requests, either by a schedule being reached or from a notification, it adds a work item for each request to the end of the queue of pending synchronization requests. Each pending synchronization request represents one <source domain controller, directory partition> pair, such as “synchronize the schema directory partition from DC1,” or “delete the ApplicationX directory partition.”

When a work item has been received into the queue, the domain controller processes the item (begins synchronizing from that source) as soon as the item reaches the front of the queue, and continues until either the destination is fully synchronized with the source domain controller, an error occurs, or the synchronization is pre-empted by a higher-priority operation.

A long replication queue is often an indication that synchronization requests are not swiftly processed by the AD server. If the reasons for the abnormal queue length are not determined quickly and addressed promptly, replication of some changes may be stalled indefinitely causing the source and destination domain controllers to remain ‘out-of-sync’ for long durations; this in turn may result in users having to work with obsolete data! To prevent such an eventuality, you can use this test to continuously track the replication queue length, so that you can be alerted as soon as the number of work items in the queue crosses an acceptable limit. You can also use the detailed diagnostics of this test to know what type of synchronization requests are in queue, so that you can figure out why the requests are taking too long to be processed.

Output of the test : One set of results for every Active Directory site being monitored

The measures made by this test are as follows: