There are numerous angles to consider when discussing troubleshooting inside Group Policy. Most of the time troubleshooting is specific to a client or a group of users, as you investigate settings gone askew or GPOs who aren't playing nicely with your workstations. To that end, we explored a number of common troubleshooting tools and procedures, including various ways to look at RSOP data. Another form of troubleshooting comes into play when inspecting server-side, or infrastructure, issues. GPO version numbers can help validate successful synchronization and replication among Domain Controllers, as can tools buried inside GPMC. We also talked about the importance of understanding those underlying replication technologies, and external variables that may affect client behavior, such as slow-link detection. Finally, we took a look at two intelligent, but often overlooked, tools inside GPMC: the Group Policy Results and Group Policy Modeling wizards. I hope you log in and start testing them out today!

This chapter on Group Policy Troubleshooting wraps up our core content for Mastering Windows Group Policy. Even if you started this book not knowing what GPO stands for, you now have the knowledge and capability to configure, manage, support, and maintain an Active Directory Group Policy environment in any company you work for.

One topic that has been missing from all of our chapters so far is Group Policy's interaction with PowerShell. We will cover that information in the next chapter. We will explore the commands, cmdlets, and syntax needed to accomplish many of the tasks and procedures that we have already covered in this book, but this time ignoring GPMC and instead turning to a PowerShell interface.