Group Policy Troubleshooting
Hi,
For those of you who frequently work with group policy, I collected some tools I’ve been using with customers to troubleshoot Group Policy issues.
GPOTool – Part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools
The Group Policy Verification tool checks the health of the Group Policy objects on domain controllers. The tool checks GPOs for consistency on each domain controller in your domain. The tool also determines whether the policies are valid and displays detailed information about replicated Group Policy objects (GPOs).
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd
Microsoft Group Policy Diagnostic Best Practice Analyzer (GPDBPA)
The Microsoft Group Policy Diagnostic Best Practice Analyzer (GPDBPA) for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is designed to help you identify Group Policy configuration errors or other dependency failures that may prevent settings or features from functioning as expected.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=47F11B02-8EE4-450B-BF13-880B91BA4566&displaylang=en
GPOAccelerator
The GPOAccelerator creates all the Group Policy objects (GPOs) that you need to deploy recommended security settings for your environment to save you hours of work that you would otherwise need to configure these settings.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a46f1dbe-760c-4807-a82f-4f02ae3c97b0&displaylang=en
For those of you who are Software Assurance Customers, the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) provides a great tool that provides enhancements to the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). The tool is called Advanced Group Policy Management or AGPM for short
Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
“Microsoft® Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) helps you better manage Group Policy objects (GPOs) in your environment by providing change control, offline editing, and role-based delegation.
From what I know and used, with AGPM you can choose which GPO’s you want to control, check the differences between two GPO’s and export them to HTML or XML Report, view the history of a GPO and deploy different versions, recover deleted GPO’s… and probably other capabilities that I didn’t check yet.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749396.aspx
Good Luck with the troubleshooting!
Thanks for Reading!