Audit user account management

Audit user account management actions with ADAudit Plus

With ADAudit Plus, you can maintain a detailed record of all user management actions in your organization to avoid hefty compliance penalties and possible IT security threats. The reports tell you the what, when, who, and where of every user account change.

Audit user account management

ADAudit Plus' user account management auditing capability records every action taken on AD user objects: account creation and deletion, password resets, enable and disable events, attribute changes, moves between OUs, and account lockouts. In an Active Directory environment, these events form the core of your access control audit trail. Without them, you can't determine whether a change was authorized, who carried it out, or what the account looked like before the change occurred.

ADAudit Plus collects and analyzes user account management events in real time, turning raw Windows Security Event Log data into structured, searchable audit records. Pre-configured reports cover every stage of the user account lifecycle, and the user behavior analytics engine flags activity that deviates from each admin's established baseline, giving you both historical records and early warning signals.

What ADAudit Plus captures in AD user account management

Track AD user account changes in real time

Every user account change in AD generates a Windows Security Event Log entry distributed across multiple domain controllers, making a complete audit trail difficult to assemble from native tools. ADAudit Plus consolidates events from all domain controllers into a single searchable record the moment they occur, with before-and-after values for every modified attribute. You can:

• View recently created, deleted, enabled, disabled, moved, and renamed accounts in a single interface, each with the identity of the person who made the change, the domain controller, and the time.
• Distinguish between a user changing their own password and an admin resetting it through dedicated reports.
• Leverage reports showing the exact prior and current value for every modified attribute, so your investigation starts with the full picture.
• Compare old and new values for display name, email address, manager, department, logon hours, group membership, and other attributes.
• View a complete history of changes made to a user account throughout its lifecycle.
• Use the recovery capability to revert a user modification to a previous state at an attribute level.

 

 

Track all changes made to user accounts in real time.

 

 

You can view the old and new value of the attributes that are modified.

Investigate account lockouts at their source

A locked-out account tells you that authentication failed repeatedly, but not why. The lockout source could be a cached credential in a mapped drive, an expired password in a scheduled task, a mobile device syncing against an old password, or a browser session holding stale credentials. ADAudit Plus's Account Lockout Analyzer identifies the specific process or device responsible without requiring manual DC-by-DC investigation.

• Trace the originating machine and IP address for every lockout without pivoting to another tool or log source.
• Review the logon history associated with each locked account to determine whether the pattern is consistent with a user error or a credential attack.
• Distinguish between a single user's forgotten password and a domain-wide lockout spike, which the UBA engine flags separately as an anomaly.

 

 

Analyze the source of an account lockout right from ADAudit Plus' console.

 

 

With the machine learning capability, you can set a baseline for lockout volume and time and detect deviations from it.

Monitor actions to privileged user accounts

Changes to privileged accounts carry greater risk than changes to standard accounts. ADAudit Plus tracks all changes to privileged roles with the details needed to confirm whether a change was authorized.

• Track every password reset on Domain Admin, Enterprise Admin, Schema Admin, and other privileged accounts, with the identity of the admin who performed it.
• Detect enable and disable events on privileged accounts; an account re-enabled unexpectedly is a common indicator of credential misuse.
• Capture attribute changes to admin accounts, including logon hours modifications, group membership changes, and so on.

Detect threats targeting user accounts

Certain attack techniques leave fingerprints in user account management events. ADAudit Plus uses two capabilities to detect these threats. It applies machine learning to establish a baseline of normal activity per user, and the Attack Surface Analyzer detects credential access attacks that directly target user accounts. With these, you can:

• Detect user management spikes above an individual admin's baseline.
• Detect first-time access patterns and out-of-hours activity tied to specific admin accounts.
• The Attack Surface Analyzer spots patterns that match Kerberoasting, Golden Ticket attacks, DCSync, pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, and brute-force attempts in a dedicated dashboard with drill-down into the events that led to the attack's discovery.

 

 

Detect well known AD attacks that target user accounts with the ability to drill down into the threat and analyze the threat timeline and involved entities.

Get real-time alerts on user account changes

ADAudit Plus ships with pre-configured alert profiles for the user account management events most likely to indicate unauthorized activity, and every profile is configurable to match your environment's risk threshold.

• When a user account is deleted, your team is notified immediately, so a mistaken or malicious deletion is caught before it affects access across dependent systems.
• When the password never-expires flag is enabled on any account, an alert fires; accounts exempt from password rotation are a persistent foothold for attackers.
• When a privileged account is modified outside business hours, the relevant team receives an alert with the full change context, reducing the mean time to response.
• When a disabled account is re-enabled, you know within seconds; re-enabling dormant accounts is a common first step in credential misuse.
• Alert thresholds are configurable, so high-volume environments only escalate events that require action rather than generating noise on routine provisioning activity.

When an alert fires, ADAudit Plus can automatically create a ticket in your ITSM tool so the right person is assigned to the incident and can begin working on a resolution even as the stakeholders are being notified.

Extend user account auditing to Microsoft Entra ID

In hybrid environments, accounts exist in both AD and Microsoft Entra ID. ADAudit Plus monitors both from a single console. You can:

• Detect recently disabled or deleted Entra ID accounts with the identity of who made the change and when.
• Track both admin-initiated password resets and self-service resets so you can distinguish routine activity from admin-level credential changes.
• Monitor sign-in attempts against disabled Entra ID accounts, a reliable indicator of credential stuffing or compromised credential reuse.

 

 

Track self-service password resets and admin-initiated password resets in distinct repots for quick investigation.

 

 

You can also track other user management actions in cloud directories on the same console to analyze actions across hybrid environments.

Meet compliance requirements for user account auditing

SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA, GLBA, GDPR, and ISO 27001 all require documented evidence of who has access to systems, when access was granted or revoked, and who made those decisions. User account management auditing is the primary source of that evidence in an AD environment.

ADAudit Plus includes pre-configured compliance report sets for all seven standards. Each maps AD audit events to the specific controls an auditor expects to see, so you're not manually assembling evidence across multiple tools hours before a review.

Custom report profiles let you build saved views that combine specific users, audit actions, date ranges, and object filters. Rather than regenerating the same filtered report before every quarterly review, you run the saved profile and deliver the output directly to auditors.

Why native auditing falls short in user management audits

The Windows Security Event Log records user account management events, but it doesn't make them actionable on its own.

• Event logs are stored locally on each DC. In a multi-DC domain, a complete picture of user account management activity requires querying every DC individually and correlating the results manually.
• The Security Event Log has a fixed maximum size. In active environments, older events are overwritten before they can be reviewed, which makes forensic investigation after the fact unreliable.
• Windows doesn't capture old and new attribute values natively for most user object changes. Event ID 4738 confirms that a user account changed; it doesn't tell you which attribute changed or what it contained before.
• There's no native root cause analysis for account lockouts. Event ID 4740 identifies the reporting DC and the caller machine. It doesn't identify the specific process, application, or device that caused the repeated authentication failures.

ADAudit Plus resolves each of these limitations: centralized collection from all domain controllers, configurable long-term archiving, before-and-after attribute values, and the Account Lockout Analyzer for root cause identification.