Ultrasound is a monitoring and troubleshooting tool for the File Replication service (FRS). FRS is used to replicate files and folders in the SYSVOL file share on domain controllers and files in Distributed File System (DFS) targets. Ultrasound is a powerful tool to measure the health of FRS replica sets by providing health ratings and historical information about replica sets. Ultrasound also allows administrators to monitor the progress of replication and detect problems that can cause replication to become backlogged or stopped.
Ultrasound works by installing WMI providers on replica members in an organization. These providers gather FRS status information, which is polled and gathered by the Ultrasound controller. The controller is the service component of Ultrasound that collects data about monitored replica sets, pushes the information into the database, and analyzes the data to look for problems or other issues that require administrator notification or intervention. By using the user interface portion of Ultrasound, known as the console, administrators can configure Ultrasound to alert them via email of serious problems and use an incident log in Ultrasound to keep track of changes or tasks they performed in response to alerts.