Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Monitor your domain controllers with performance metrics

Amazon Directory Service integrates with Amazon CloudWatch to help provide you with important performance metrics for each domain controller in your Active Directory. This means that you can monitor domain controller performance counters, such as CPU and memory utilization. You can also configure alarms and initiate automated actions to respond to periods of high utilization. For example, you can configure an alarm for domain controller CPU utilization above 70 percent and create an SNS topic to notify you when this occurs. You can use this SNS topic to initiate automation, such as Amazon Lambda functions, to increase the number of domain controllers to your Active Directory.

For more information about monitoring your domain controllers, see Determine when to add domain controllers with CloudWatch metrics.

There are fees associated with Amazon CloudWatch. For more information, see CloudWatch billing and cost.

Find domain controller performance metrics in CloudWatch

In the Amazon CloudWatch console, metrics for a given service are grouped first by the service's namespace. You can add metric filters that are subordinate to that namespace. Use the following procedure to locate the correct namespace and subordinate metric that is required to set up Amazon Managed Microsoft AD domain controller metrics in CloudWatch.

For instructions on how to set up domain controller metrics using the CloudWatch console, see How to automate Amazon Managed Microsoft AD scaling based on utilization metrics in the Amazon Security Blog.

Determine when to add domain controllers with CloudWatch metrics

Load balancing across all of your domain controllers is important for the resilience and performance of your Active Directory. To help you optimize the performance of your domain controllers in Amazon Managed Microsoft AD, we recommend that you first monitor important metrics in CloudWatch to form a baseline. During this process, you analyze your Active Directory over time to identify your average and peak Active Directory utilization. After determining your baseline, you can monitor these metrics on a regular basis to help determine when to add a domain controller to your Active Directory.

The following metrics are important to monitor on a regular basis. For a full list of available domain controller metrics in CloudWatch, see Amazon Managed Microsoft AD performance counters.

For instructions on how to set up domain controller metrics using the CloudWatch console, see How to automate Amazon Managed Microsoft AD scaling based on utilization metrics in the Amazon Security Blog. For general information about metrics in CloudWatch, see Using Amazon CloudWatch metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

For general information about domain controller planning, see Capacity planning for Active Directory Domain Services on the Microsoft website.

Amazon Managed Microsoft AD performance counters

The following table lists all performance counters available in Amazon CloudWatch for tracking domain controller and directory performance in Amazon Managed Microsoft AD.