Schedule active directory audit reports

Monitoring the Microsoft Windows Active Directory network is the best approach organizations can follow in order to address growing business threats due to unattended / unexpected changes like for eg in group policy, access permissions, computers etc.... However, it is easier said than done. The reason is that Active Directory is abuzz with enormous amount of routine, expected and other unexpected change events. Changes effected by users and done to other AD objects are continuously logged into the Active Directory security logs. Because of its sheer enormity, it is difficult to extract these data through native methods. Even if one manages to extract these event log data – which is valuable and imperative for organizations to thwart any impending security threats – to trach them and make available to the right people in right time is a tough task in itself!

For this reason administrators fancy solutions that will:

• View in real-time, the Active Directory change reports.
• Automate 'AD change information' to the right people without the need of manual extraction.
• Provide options to view Active Directory changes from anywhere in the domain and in a format that is convenient to interpret.
• Automatically notify reports, preferably with abilities to schedule them.

ManageEngine ADAudit Plus understands the need for the availability of change information (real-time change reports) to people who matter. Besides providing easy means to extract the right change event information about any desired/undesired event, it allows an administrator to email these to one or more specified recipients at scheduled times. Further the scheduled reports can be viewed with real-time update of AD changes in a convenient ADAudit Plus web interface too.

Scheduling of reports comes with a great deal of flexibility in ADAudit Plus and is completely at the discretion of an administrator.

Advantages of automated reporting and delivery

Provided below is a non-exhaustive list of the advantages of the automated scheduled report delivery by ADAudit Plus:

• Automate report extraction at scheduled times can be set up; this reduces the valuable time and effort spent on extracting reports manually.
• An email notification reduces the need for a login into the ADAudit Plus web portal. This gives an opportunity for an administrator to allow non-admin users like auditors, IT Managers and helpdesk staff view one or more change reports right from their mailboxes.
• Reports can be viewed on-the-fly by administrators and other designated users. This allows an administrator to exercise continuous control over changes that occur in the AD, even when he is not at office.
• Both default and custom configured reports can be scheduled and emailed. This allows an administrator to exercise continuous control over specific Active Directory changes that occur in the AD.
• The ability to configure the frequency of report extraction and its notification – on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis – is advantageous. This wide choice of scheduling options added to a robust alerting mechanism enhances operational efficiency of an administrator.
• The history of all reports generated is maintained in ADAudit Plus database, this acts as a valuable reference cutting down the need for repetitive excavation procedures
• ADAudit Plus has multiple storage format options (which include csv, html, pdf or xls) and allows for an organized backup of scheduled reports in a specified file server.
• Reports delivered to mailboxes are already a source of secondary back-up.

ADAudit Plus does the dirty job of extracting the event log data from the Windows Active Directory Domain controllers. The scheduling feature of ADAudit Plus, with facilities to automatically extract and deliver change information at desired times, is indeed a luxury to be savored.