Active Directory audit reports

AD audit reports with ADAudit Plus

What are AD audit reports?

AD is the identity backbone of most enterprise environments. Every user account, group membership, Group Policy setting, and permission assignment flows through it, and every change carries security and compliance implications. When something goes wrong, the first question is always the same: who made that change, and when?

ADAudit Plus answers that question with 300+ pre-configured reports covering every AD object type and event category. Reports are available the moment you deploy. No query writing, no log parsing, no custom scripts to maintain. Whether you need a forensic trail after an incident or a compliance-ready summary before an audit, the reports are already there.

Key AD activities ADAudit Plus reports on

Track every change to AD objects

AD object changes are the core of any audit trail. A user account modified at 2 a.m. by an account that normally works nine to five, a computer moved to an OU with weaker policy, a group that suddenly has 40 new members: none of these are visible without a change record that shows the before state and the after state. ADAudit Plus captures the full lifecycle of every AD object, with before-and-after values, caller identity, machine name, and timestamp for every change.

• Password reset and password change events are reported separately, so you can distinguish self-service resets from admin-initiated ones.
• Group membership additions and removals are captured at the event level, so a bulk import of 200 users into a security group generates 200 individual auditable records.
• OU creation, deletion, movement, and renaming are each covered by dedicated reports, with the identity and timestamp of whoever made the change.
• Schema changes and configuration partition changes, which are low-frequency but high-risk events, are audited separately and trigger alerts when configured.

 

 

Track changes to user account attributes with detailed visibility into the modified attribute name, old and new values, initiating user, and the exact time of modification.

Monitor logon activity and account lockouts

Logon data is the most frequently queried section of any AD audit. Failed logon spikes indicate brute-force attempts, while logons outside business hours from unfamiliar machines indicate potential credential misuse. Account lockouts that repeat on the same account often point to a misconfigured service running with stale credentials.

• Failed logons are broken down by failure reason (bad password, bad username, account locked out) so you can distinguish a forgotten password from a systematic attack.
• The Logon Failures report identifies the source machine and IP address for every failed attempt, giving you immediate context without pivoting to another log source.
• Concurrent session reports identify users logged into more than one machine at the same time, which can indicate shared credentials or an active intrusion.
• The Account Lockout Analyzer identifies the exact lockout source (a scheduled task, mapped drive, or service) alongside the originating machine and IP address.

 

 

Identify the root cause of recurring AD account lockouts by analyzing multiple sources, including network drive mappings, running processes, applications, and more.

Monitor privileged user activity

Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, and Schema Admins have unrestricted access across your AD environment, making their actions one of the most critical areas to audit. Unauthorized or accidental changes by privileged accounts can introduce significant security and operational risks.

ADAudit Plus provides a centralized audit trail for every action performed by privileged users across all AD object types, including user management, group modifications, GPO changes, permission assignments, and schema updates.

• Review privileged account activity from a centralized audit trail.
• Monitor Schema Admin activity, which should remain infrequent and tightly controlled in secure AD environments.
• Detect privileged account activity outside regular business hours using user behavior analytics (UBA) powered anomaly detection.

 

 

Monitor changes made by privileged users across AD objects, including users, groups, computers, OUs, and more.

Extend auditing to Entra ID and hybrid environments

The Cloud Auditing module extends your visibility beyond on-premises AD to Microsoft Entra ID, providing a unified view of user and administrator activity across both environments from a single console.

• Audit successful and failed Entra ID sign-ins, including account lockouts, disabled account sign-in attempts, and MFA-related failures, with correlated details such as the user’s on-premises Distinguished Name, SID, and GUID to connect cloud activity back to your AD environment.
• Track user, device, and group management activity, including password changes, dynamic group membership updates, and role assignments or removals, with alerts for critical events such as Global Administrator role assignments.
• Monitor application modifications, API consent changes, and license assignment events across Entra ID to identify unauthorized access expansion and unintended entitlement changes.

 

 

Gain a unified view of logon activity across your AD and Entra ID environments.

Get real-time alerts on critical changes

Reports tell you what happened. Alerts tell you what is happening right now. ADAudit Plus includes 50+ default alert profiles for AD events, each configurable for threshold, recipient, and delivery method.

• When a user is added to Domain Admins, your team is notified immediately so an unauthorized privilege assignment is caught before it is acted on.
• When an account lockout policy is changed, you receive an alert with the exact GPO that was modified and the identity of whoever changed it, so policy weakening does not go undetected until the next audit cycle.
• When the security event log is cleared, an alert fires in real time. Log clearing is one of the most reliable indicators that an attacker is trying to cover their tracks.

When an alert fires, ADAudit Plus can auto-create a ticket in ServiceNow, Jira, Freshservice, or ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, so your team responds without waiting for a manual handoff.

Meet compliance requirements with pre-built report sets

Every major compliance framework that touches identity and access management requires an audit trail of AD activity. ADAudit Plus ships with dedicated compliance report sets for seven standards, all available out of the box. Custom report profiles let you save filtered views combining specific users, actions, and date ranges for recurring audit cycles.

Reports can be scheduled for automatic delivery and exported in CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX format, so quarterly audit packs go out without manual preparation.

Why native tools fall short

Windows generates security event logs containing the raw data behind every AD change and logon event. The limitation is not what Windows records; it is what you can do with those records using only the tools that ship with the operating system.

• Security event logs are stored locally on each DC and overwritten as logs fill. There is no centralized store, no automatic archiving, and no guaranteed retention period unless you have built one yourself.
• Event Viewer gives you a single-event view with no built-in correlation between events, no reporting layer, and no way to answer "show me everything this user did this week" without manual filtering across multiple DCs.
• PowerShell scripts can query event logs, but they depend on the log still existing on each DC at the time you run the query. If the log has been overwritten or cleared, the data is gone.

ADAudit Plus centralizes event collection from all DCs in real time, retains data for the period your policy requires, and layers reporting, alerting, and UBA on top of the raw event stream. The gap between "something happened" and "here is exactly what happened, who did it, and what it looked like before" closes immediately.