Active directory monitoring software

AD monitoring with ADAudit Plus

What is AD monitoring software?

AD controls authentication, authorization, and access for every user, device, and application in your environment. Monitoring it means keeping a continuous, timestamped record of who changed what, who signed in from where, and whether any of those events point to a threat or a policy violation. Without that record, security incidents are hard to reconstruct, compliance audits take longer than they should, and unauthorized changes go undetected until they cause real damage.

ADAudit Plus collects and indexes events from every domain controller (DC) in your environment, surfaces them through 300+ pre-configured reports, and applies machine learning to catch behavioral anomalies that rule-based tools miss. On-premises AD, Entra ID, Windows servers, workstations, and file servers are all covered from a single console.

Key activities ADAudit Plus monitors in AD

Track changes to AD objects, users, and groups

Every change to an AD object produces an event that ADAudit Plus captures, indexes, and surfaces in a report. User management covers the complete account lifecycle from creation through deletion, capturing every intermediate state change with who-made-it, from-which-machine, and at-what-time.

• Group membership changes show the member added or removed, the group type, and the caller identity, so you can confirm that Domain Admin additions were authorized.
• Before-and-after attribute values are captured for every user modification, giving you a complete record without querying individual DCs.
• Computer attribute changes and OU moves are timestamped and attributed, so delegation changes or reorganizations are immediately visible in the audit trail.

 

 

Track changes made to user account attributes with detailed visibility into the modified attribute name, old value, new value, caller user name, and the exact timestamp of the modification.

Audit Group Policy and permission changes

Group policy changes affect every machine and user the policy applies to. ADAudit Plus captures GPO changes at two levels: the object level (created, deleted, linked, unlinked) and the settings level (what changed inside the policy, with before-and-after values).

• Password Policy Changes and Account Lockout Policy Changes reports show exactly which setting was modified, by whom, and from which machine.
• Security Settings Changes and User Rights Assignment Changes surface GPO-level modifications that would otherwise require manual comparison of policy backups.
• Group Policy Permission Changes capture who can now edit, link, or read a GPO, an access change that directly affects who can modify security policy.
• AdminSDHolder Permission Changes are captured as a named event, so you can catch an unauthorized change before it propagates to privileged groups.
• The Attack Surface Analyzer scans DCs, Windows Servers, and workstations against 350+ predefined benchmark settings to identify GPO misconfigurations and potential exposure points across the environment.

 

 

Get a quick in-depth GPO based risk exposure visualization across multiple systems to identify the most vulnerable systems in a domain.

Monitor logon activity and resolve account lockouts

Logon data tells you who accessed your environment, from which machine, at what time, and whether that access succeeded or failed. ADAudit Plus aggregates logon events across every DC, Windows Server, and workstation into a unified view, and the Account Lockout Analyzer traces every lockout to its originating machine, IP address, and the specific process responsible.

• Failed logon analysis separates bad-password failures from bad-username failures: one usually means a forgotten credential, the other may mean a password spray attack.
• RDP session activity is tracked end to end, including session start, session end, and gateway connections.
• Lockout source identification covers scheduled tasks or services running with stale credentials, mapped drives, and more.
• Lockout source and logon activity for the affected account appear in the same view, so first-line support can resolve recurring lockouts without escalating to AD admins.

 

 

Gain complete visibility into failed logon attempts across your domain with details such as user name, client IP, client host, DC, logon time, and failure reason.

Monitor privileged user activity

Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, and Schema Admins have rights that, if abused or compromised, affect the entire directory. ADAudit Plus tracks their activity continuously; every action a privileged account takes appears in the audit trail with full who-what-when-where detail.

• LAPS password reads are captured per account: see who retrieved which local administrator password, when, and from which machine.
• Modified Admin Groups alerts fire when a user is added to or removed from a privileged group, so membership changes are detected immediately.
• Unusual Volume of User Management Activity in the Analytics module flags spikes in administrative actions above an admin's own learned baseline, which can indicate account compromise or privilege abuse.

 

 

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

Detect anomalies with UBA and threats with Attack Surface Analyzer

The Attack Surface Analyzer detects 25+ named AD attacks in real time, including brute-force, Golden Ticket attacks, DCSync, RID hijacking, and more

User behavior analytics (UBA) leverages machine learning to establish a behavioral baseline for each user based on patterns such as typical logon times, frequently accessed machines, authentication activity, and the volume and timing of administrative actions. Any deviation from this baseline is automatically flagged in the Analytics tab without the need for manual threshold configuration.

• Unusual Volume of Logon Failure detects spikes in failed authentication attempts beyond a user's normal baseline, helping identify brute-force attacks or credential compromise.
• Unusual Volume of User Management Activity flags spikes in account creation, modification, or deletion actions by an administrator, catching behavior that falls outside their normal pattern.
• Unusual Volume of File Activity and Unusual Volume of File Deletions detect spikes in file operations that exceed a user's baseline, flagging potential data exfiltration or ransomware activity before it completes.

 

 

Use machine learning to identify suspicious patterns such as unusually high logon failure volumes, abnormal logon times, first-time host access attempts, and more.

Get real-time alerts on critical AD changes

Catching a change after it happens is useful for forensics. Catching it as it happens gives you a chance to respond before the damage is done. ADAudit Plus ships with pre-configured alert profiles covering the events that matter most. You can extend or narrow these to match your environment without writing custom queries.

• When a user is locked out, you can trace the lockout source and notify the help desk via email or SMS.
• Group membership changes in privileged groups trigger an alert the moment they are written to the directory, so unauthorized Domain Admin additions are caught immediately.
• Domain policy changes, schema modifications, and audit log clearing events each have dedicated alert profiles, covering the events attackers specifically target to weaken your security posture.

When an alert fires, ADAudit Plus creates a ticket in ServiceNow, Zendesk, Jira, or your configured ITSM tool and notifies the responsible team by email or SMS. The alert, ticket, and notification happen as a single automated chain.

Meet audit and compliance requirements

Compliance reporting in ADAudit Plus uses the same event data as security monitoring, so you are not maintaining two separate audit processes. Pre-configured compliance reports cover SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA, GLBA, GDPR, and ISO 27001, each mapped to the specific controls that require AD audit evidence.

For recurring compliance workflows, custom report profiles let you combine specific users, audit actions, time ranges, and object types into a saved view that can be scheduled for automatic delivery to auditors, IT managers, or compliance officers. That is how you produce consistent, repeatable evidence without assembling reports manually before each audit cycle.

Why native tools fall short

Windows Event Viewer provides access to security logs on individual DCs, but it was designed for troubleshooting, not continuous audit. There is no built-in way to correlate logon data with change events or retain logs beyond the local security log's size limit.

• PowerShell can query event logs across the domain, but the output needs manual parsing, and the queries themselves have to be written, maintained, and scheduled separately. There is no alerting layer, no behavioral baseline, and no way to produce compliance-ready reports directly from query output.
• Security event logs are stored locally on each DC by default. A multi-DC environment produces fragmented, independent logs with no unified view.
• The Windows security log overwrites earlier events once it reaches capacity, leaving gaps in the audit trail without a separate retention mechanism.

ADAudit Plus addresses each of these gaps: centralized collection across all DCs, configurable retention, before-and-after values for every change, and a reporting and alerting layer that requires no scripting.