So far we have been creating GPOs and putting settings into them, so we are well aware of what is happening with each of our policies. Many times, though, you enter a new environment that contains a lot of existing policies, and you may need to figure out what is happening in those policies. I have had many cases where I install a new server, join it to the domain, and it breaks. It doesn't necessarily nose dive, but some component won't work properly or I can't flow network traffic to it for some reason. Something like that can be hard to track down. Since the issue seemed to happen during the domain join process, I suspect that some kind of policy from an existing GPO has been applied to my new server and is having a negative effect on it. Let's take a look inside Group Policy at the easiest way to display the settings that are contained within each GPO.
For this recipe, we only need access to the Group Policy Management Console, which I am going to run from my Server 2016 domain controller server.
To quickly view the settings contained within a GPO, follow these steps:
- In the Domain Controller, open up Server Manager and launch the Group Policy Management Console from inside the Tools menu.
- Expand the name of your domain, then expand the Group Policy Objects folder. This displays all of the GPOs currently configured in your domain.
- Click on one of the GPOs so that you see the Links and Security Filtering sections in the right window pane.
- Now click on the Settings tab near the top.
- Once you have Settings tab open, click on the show all link near the top right. This will display all of the settings that are currently configured inside that GPO.
In this very simple recipe, we use the Group Policy Management Console in order to view the currently configured settings inside our GPOs. This can be very useful for checking over existing settings and for comparing them against what is actually being configured on the client computers. Taking a look through this information can also help you to spot potential problems, such as duplicate settings spread across multiple GPOs.
Viewing the settings included in a GPO can be helpful during troubleshooting, but there are many other tools that can be additionally used in order to troubleshoot Group Policy. Here are a couple of links to help you understand the recommended procedures for troubleshooting Group Policy: