DNS ‘Accidentally’ Uninstalled in AD Domain – Server 2008

Answer found, and it's a bit unpleasant (at least if you were expecting the people creating management packs to actually know what they are doing).

Extracted from the monitor's description:

This monitor verifies forwarder availability by performing an NSLOOKUP on the targeted forwarder.

The script executes nslookup -timeout=<value> -querytype=<type> <name> <server>

<type> is A, NS, SOA.

<name> is target DNS name to resolve. If unconditional forwarder, the override value is used else the forwarder domain name is used.

<server> is the name of the server where the NSLOOKUP query occurs.
The value is $Target/Property[Type="DNS!Microsoft.Windows.DNSServer.Library.Server"]/ListeningIP$ which provides a listing of all IP addresses that the current DNS server is listening on.

<value> is timeout seconds/3 because timeout seconds is used to set the maximum time the script can run.

Unconditional Forwarder Example: NSLOOKUP -timeout=30 -querytype=a www.microsoft.com 10.0.0.5 would query server 10.0.0.5 for the DNS name for www.microsoft.com. In this case, you would set the actual timeout seconds to 90 monitor override.

Conditional Forwarder Example: NSLOOKUP -timeout=30 -querytype=a www.msn.com 10.0.0.5 would query server 10.0.0.5 for the actual name of the conditional forwarder targeted by this monitor.

What this means is that the SCOM agent will try to perform queries like these ones:

nslookup -timeout=30 -querytype=a domainB.dom <server>
nslookup -timeout=30 -querytype=a someotherzone.local <server>
nslookup -timeout=30 -querytype=a 0.0.10.in-addr.arpa <server>

This would work for the main AD domain's DNS zone (because DCs automatically register themselves as empty A records for that zone), but would fail for "someotherzone.local", which didn't have any empty A record (I can confirm that, after manually creating one, the alert disappeared and the monitor returned to green).

The third query, of course, would always fail, because it just doesn't make any sense at all to look for an A record in a reverse lookup zone.

Resolution: override the DNS Forwarder Availability Monitor to perform a NS or SOA query for the forwarded zone instead of an A query.
Which is what it should have been doing from the very beginning.

First of all, please read my blog post about how to name your AD.

Ok, so now you're hopefully ready to name your AD ad.example.com or corp.example.com. Good choice, that's very reasonable of you.

To answer your actual question, after you complete the domain rename and reboot the DCs, they will self-register everything necessary in the _msdcs zone.

A word of warning, do this in a test lab two or three times first. You only get one shot, don't screw it up!