The group policy infrastructure has to perform optimally for you to apply policy settings to computers
and users correctly in very large enterprises.
With thousands of GPOs spread across multiple locations in time zones, there could be a significant
replication delay between domain controllers.
A mismatch in version numbers between the group policy container and the group policy template of a
GPO might indicate an issue with group policy in group policy management console.
You can create a report displaying the overall health state of the group policy infrastructure for a
domain.
You can also display the health of a single GPO.
The status tab on the domain and group policy management console can display information that indicates
the health of the group policy infrastructure.
The information displayed on the tab contains information regarding domain controllers, GPO replication
and GPO versioning.
The health status helps you find any irregularities.
You can perform a health analysis on either the entire domain or on a single GPO.
You perform the task from the status tab on the domain, or select a GPO by clicking Detect.
Now you choose which domain controller you want to select as the baseline group policy management console,
then compares both the group policy container and the group policy template on all the domain controllers
in the selected domain with the Baseline Domain Controller.
The analysis performs the following comparisons permissions for each group policy container version
number for each group policy template number of group policy container objects permissions on each group
policy template version numbers stored for each group policy container number of group policy template
folders and files cache information for each file in all group policy templates.
If group policy management console cannot contact a domain controller during the analysis, or if a
domain controller is not consistent with the domain controller used as a baseline, then group policy
management console adds the analyzed domain controller to the domain controllers with replication in
progress list.