Active directory change alerts

Active directory alerts with ADAudit Plus

Beyond keeping you in the know about critical events, ADAudit Plus' AD change alerts allow you to respond to incidents with preconfigured actions.

What AD changes ADAudit Plus alerts you to

Alert on critical account and object changes

When a user is added to Domain Admins, when a password policy is loosened, or when an account lockout policy is removed, your team receives an alert before the change propagates to endpoints.

• When a new account is created in a privileged OU, you know immediately, so unauthorized provisioning is caught before the account is activated.
• When a user's password is reset outside of business hours, the alert information shows the resetting admin's identity, machine name, and IP address, giving your team everything needed for a follow-up.
• Account lockout alerts include the root cause identified by the Account Lockout Analyzer: whether the source was a scheduled task, a mapped drive, a mobile device, or a browser session, so your help desk resolves the cause beyond simply unlocking the account.

 

 

Track and receive alerts for account lockouts, with details about the locked out user, origin machine, and more.

 

 

Drill down to identify the source of the lockout to know the device, service, or mapped drive using incorrect credentials.

Alert on Group Policy and schema changes

A single GPO modification can propagate to thousands of endpoints. ADAudit Plus notifies stakeholders the moment a GPO is deleted or a setting within a policy is modified, with before-and-after values included in the notification.

• When account lockout policy settings change, you see the old threshold and the new threshold side by side, not just a notification that a change occurred.
• You can also set alerts for schema modifications since they are irreversible and affect every object class in your domain.
• GPO permission changes, which control who can edit or link a policy, generate an alert showing the exact change and the identity of the person who made it.

 

 

View a detailed history of changes that have occurred on any selected Group Policy Object.

Monitor privileged user activity with targeted alerts

ADAudit Plus provides dedicated alert coverage for every action performed by a privileged account. This is done based on individual events and also from the UBA capability so you can detect actions such as:

• When a Domain Admin account logs on from a machine it has never accessed.
• The first time a privilege is exercised so you can verify intent rather than assume legitimacy.
• When a service account that normally runs scheduled tasks attempts an interactive logon, the behavior is flagged as an anomaly.
• AdminSDHolder Permission Changes, which propagate automatically to all accounts in protected groups. An unauthorized change to AdminSDHolder silently propagates to your entire administrative tier.

 

 

Domain-level permission changes are modifications to access rights or privileges that affect the entire Active Directory domain, such as changes to privileged groups, domain-wide policies, or critical access control settings. You can track these with detailed reports and alerts.

Detect attacks with threat-aware alert profiles

ADAudit Plus includes dedicated alert profiles for 25+ well-known AD attack techniques, which fire the moment event log patterns associated with each technique appear. With Attack Surface Analyzer, you can detect:

• Kerberoasting attempts, Golden Ticket attacks, and DCSync attacks, which have dedicated alert profiles that fire on the specific event sequences associated with each technique.
• Pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket attacks are detected through authentication anomalies: NTLM authentication from accounts that normally use Kerberos, or Kerberos tickets presented from unusual source machines.

 

 

Detect 25+ well-known AD attacks with information on the affected user accounts, originating machine IP address, and event timeline showing attacker actions before and after detection.

Extend alerts to hybrid and cloud environments

Most organizations run on-premises AD alongside Microsoft Entra ID. Separate alerting configurations create gaps an attacker can exploit when pivoting between environments. ADAudit Plus provides a single alert configuration point for your entire identity environment.

Alert coverage for Microsoft Entra ID includes risky sign-ins, password spray detections, impossible travel events, OAuth2.0 permission grants, and Conditional Access policy changes.

Automate your response with alert-triggered actions

An alert without automated follow-through adds latency to incident response. ADAudit Plus connects its alert engine directly to your response workflow, so detection and containment happen in sequence rather than in separate queues.

When an alert is triggered, ADAudit Plus can auto-create a ticket in ServiceNow, Jira, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Freshservice, Zendesk, or Kayako, with full event details pre-populated. Your on-call engineer opens a ticket that already contains the who, what, when, and from where of the incident.

Response automation also covers direct actions: ADAudit Plus can disable a user account, disconnect an active session, or shut down an endpoint when specific alert conditions are triggered, with no manual review required.

Meet compliance requirements with audit-ready alerts

Compliance-specific alert activity reports show auditors which events were monitored, which alerts were triggered, and what response was taken. Custom report profiles let your audit team pull up saved configurations for specific users, object types, and event criteria without IT involvement.

Each alert-triggered ticket creates a documented record of the detection and response chain, satisfying incident response requirements for regulations.

Why native tools fall short for AD change alerting

Windows does not include a built-in notification mechanism for AD changes. Event Viewer collects security events on each domain controller locally, but it has no capability to notify your team when a defined condition is met.

PowerShell can poll event logs and send notifications, but maintaining those scripts across domains requires ongoing development, and any gap in collection creates a silent blind spot with no failure indication.

ADAudit Plus replaces that patchwork with a centralized collection engine that covers every domain controller, applies alert criteria in real time, and delivers notifications through managed profiles, with no requirement for scripting or maintenance overhead.