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Best Practices Analyzer Tool for Forefront Unified Access Gateway is here!

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We are happy to announce the availability of the first version of the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) Tool for the Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG). You are welcome to download it to try it out. The purpose of UAG BPA is to help UAG administrators to verify proper configuration, and to troubleshoot UAG-related issues.

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Figure 1 : Welcome to UAG BPA!

The UAG BPA is a diagnostic tool that automatically performs specific tests on configuration data collected on the local Forefront UAG server from a hierarchy of administration COM objects, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, the system registry, files on disk, and the Domain Name System (DNS) settings.

The resulting report details critical configuration issues, potential problems, and information about the UAG server status. By following the recommendations of the tool, UAG administrators can achieve greater performance, scalability, reliability, and uptime.

So what is inside UAG BPA Version 1.0?

  • Checks – UAG BPA includes 30+ checks (also called rules), and collects around 100 UAG, UAG-DA and machine settings. The focus of this release is to target issues around DirectAccess, Exchange and SharePoint publishing deployments. An additional suite includes high capacity, NLB and activation related issues.
  • Documentation – The UAG BPA help file covers all the checks supported by UAG BPA v1.0. You can easily find information about how to operate UAG BPA, information about specific checks, and how to fix issues that UAG BPA has detected.

In the example below, the BPA report on my UAG server indicated several potential configuration issues:

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Figure 2 : UAG BPA report example

Using the help link (“Tell me more about this issue…”), I can access the relevant article to see more information on this issue, its severity and ways to resolve it.

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Figure 3 : UAG BPA content help messages

UAG BPA is available now online at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d24994ef-8670-4324-957a-805d35f1244e. Note:  the tool will require .NET 2.0 framework or above to be installed first.  We are always excited to hear feedback and you can mail your comments, information about bug reports, feature requests and other suggestions to uagbpa@microsoft.com.

Author:
Olga Levina, Program Manager

Contributor :
Juda Thitron, Senior Development Lead