Azure AD Connect can be managed from the Azure portal after installation and configuration on the on-premises domain controller. To manage it, you have to perform the following steps:
- Navigate to the Azure portal by opening https://portal.azure.com.
- In the left menu, select Azure Active Directory.
- Under Manage, select Azure AD Connect. In the Azure AD Connect blade, as shown in the following screenshot, you can see that sync is enabled, that the last sync was more than a day ago, and that Password Hash Sync is enabled:
Azure AD Connect settings
- You can also set the three authentication methods under USER SIGN-IN. Here, you can set the authentication method to Federation, Seamless single sign-on, or Pass-through authentication. You can monitor the health of your on-premises infrastructure and synchronization services under HEALTH AND ANALYTICS.
- To check whether the users are synced, you can go to the User overview blade. Here, you will find your synced users, as shown in the following screenshot:
Synced users
Azure AD Connect sync synchronizes changes in your on-premises directory using a scheduler. There are two scheduler processes: one for password synchronization and another for object/attribute sync and maintenance tasks. For more information on how to configure this or how to create a custom scheduler using PowerShell, you can refer to the following tutorial: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/how-to-connect-sync-feature-scheduler.
In this demonstration, we managed Azure AD Connect from the Azure portal. In the next section, we are going to cover how to manage password writeback in more detail.