What is audit privilege use?

Written by Titus Manohar, IT security team, ManageEngine  •  Updated on May 2026

Audit Privilege Use is a security policy setting, which when enabled, ascertains whether to audit each incident of users exercising their rights.

You can choose to audit successes, failures, or not audit the event type at all. Success audit entries are generated when the exercise of a user right is successful, while failure audit entries are generated when the exercise of a user right is not successful. To set this value to No auditing, select the Define these policy settings check box in the Properties dialog box for this policy setting, and deselect the Success and Failure check boxes.

This setting can be accessed by navigating to Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Audit Policy.

Note: The following user rights are not audited in this security policy since they may generate too many events in the security log, slowing down your computer's performance:

• Bypass traverse checking
• Debug programs
• Create a token object
• Replace process level token
• Generate security audits
• Back up files and directories
• Restore files and directories

About ADAudit Plus:

ADAudit Plus is a real time change auditing software that helps keep your Active Directory, Azure AD, Windows file servers, NetApp filers, EMC file systems, Synology file systems, Windows member servers, and workstations secure and compliant. With ADAudit Plus, you can get visibility into:

• Authorized and unauthorized AD management changes
• User logons, logoffs, and account lockouts
• GPO changes
• Group attribute and membership changes
• OU changes
• Privileged access and permission changes

among other things.

There are more than 200 event-specific reports, and you can configure instant email alerts. You can also export the reports to XLS, HTML, PDF and CSV formats to assist in interpretation and forensics.