Azure AD connect synchronization history not showing what i expect

Question

Hello Community,

Today i noticed a strange behavior in Azure AD Connect
I'm not sure if this behavior is by design or not. I hope someone can tell me more about this.

I will try to describe problem as clear as i can.

I have an AD user object synchronized to AAD

I change the company property in AD from nothing to companyname

I manually start an Delta sync cycle with PowerShell

As you can see the user object has 1 update that is exported to AAD on 19:07:19

I change the company property in AD from nothing to othercompanyname

I manually start an Delta sync cycle with PowerShell
As you can see the user object has 1 update that is exported to AAD on 19:09:08

So far so good

But when i look again at the export step with End time 19:07:19 and i open the details of the updates i would expect to see what was really happended at that time, but it shows me the same change as of 19:09:08

So my question is:

Is this by design?
Why is a history kept when we couldn't see the details?
And if this is by design, is there a way to see the history of the synchronizations?

I see this behavior with version: 1.5.30.0 and version: 1.5.45.0

Regards,

Robbert

Answer 1

This is by design. When you are looking at the history of each run profile execution (ie: Import/Sync/Export on AD/AAD), it shows the high level overview of how many Adds, Updates, Deletes, etc.. as you highlight in this picture:

The level of detail contained here is only to the level of "On this cycle, this object had a modification of this type (ie: Add, Update, Rename, Delete..) occur". However, if you click on that object and the look at the Connector Space Object Properties, the state of the object in the Connector Space Object Properties window will always be the current known state of the object in AAD Connect.

As to the question of "Why was this designed this way?" - the AAD Connect SQL database can already easily grow to be tens or hundreds of gigabytes in size - with only keeping the current state of each object in each connector space. It is not practical to maintain a rolling 7 day history of each object, as this would potentially increase the size of the SQL database by a large amount, boxing out many customers from using SQL Express for AAD Connect and severely impacting performance of the application in the process.

Answer 2

Is nobody else facing this issue?