Active Directory Cleanup Tool

What is Active Directory cleanup?

Active Directory (AD) cleanup is the process of identifying and removing inactive objects like users, computers, groups, and contacts from your AD environment. AD cleanup can be performed using native tools like PowerShell and ADUC, but these methods are often time-consuming and require advanced expertise. With an automated AD cleanup solution, this process can be streamlined to ensure your environment remains secure and clutter-free.

Why should you clean up your Active Directory?

As employees leave or roles change, their user accounts, computers, groups, and contacts in AD become obsolete over time. If not addressed, these objects, often called orphaned accounts, quietly increase your security and compliance risks while degrading performance.

Here's what happens when you have inactive accounts:

• Security vulnerabilities: Inactive accounts are rarely monitored and may still use default or outdated passwords, making them easier to compromise. Compromised accounts are a major identity security risk. If hackers or former employees exploit these accounts, they'll get unauthorized access to networks and sensitive data, as permissions are often still intact.
• Operational inefficiency: Having many unnecessary objects makes administration and troubleshooting complex. This also increases the difficulty of managing permissions and isolating root causes during security incidents. Moreover, regulations require accurate tracking of users and permissions, and inactive objects undermine these efforts, leading to possible fines or failing audits.
• Resource consumption: Each AD object uses up database space, contributing to clutter, slowing down authentication, and degrading server performance. In cloud-based directory services, unused objects increase storage and data transfer costs as providers often bill based on volume.

Regularly identifying stale, disabled, or expired objects and cleaning them up are some best practices for AD hygiene. This can save you from unnecessary risks, compliance headaches, and performance slowdowns.

Simplify AD cleanup using ADManager Plus

ADManager Plus helps you trace all inactive, disabled, and account-expired users and computers in AD and manage them efficiently. With ADManager Plus' intuitive interface, you not only get to automate AD cleanup, but you also enhance your user life cycle management strategy.

This AD cleanup tool offers predefined, comprehensive reports that help you quickly identify and clean up stale accounts across your AD. You can:

• Detect user or computer accounts that haven't logged on during a specified timeframe.
• Identify expired, unused, or dormant AD user accounts.
• Bulk-enable, disable, move, or delete inactive accounts, including users, computers, groups, and contacts.
• Retrieve key insights such as last logon times and lists of disabled AD accounts.
• Export report data in multiple formats, including CSV, XLSX, HTML, PDF, and CSVDE.

Find and manage stale AD accounts

ADManager Plus helps you detect and remove inactive AD accounts by allowing you to generate reports and delete, disable, or move users to a different OU, right from these reports. This reduces risks from orphaned accounts and improves AD maintenance.

Disabled accounts

With ADManager Plus, you can easily generate the list of user or computer accounts that are disabled. The userAccountControl attribute is used to locate the disabled users in the domain. You can manage these accounts easily by deleting them or moving the accounts to another OU. You can also delete AD accounts, enable or disable users, or move accounts to another OU from the reports' results.

Expired user accounts

AD user accounts that have gone obsolete for a long time can expire without either the user or admin knowing about them. Writing a script to find expired accounts can be tedious, but luckily, the ADManager Plus report generator scans your AD and gives you a list of all expired accounts. Right from the report, you can proactively secure your network by deleting, disabling, or moving expired users to another OU. You can also print and export reports on expired accounts, locked out users, and other parameters to XLS, CSV, PDF, HTML, and more.

Inactive AD user accounts

Using ADManager Plus, you can retrieve inactive AD user accounts, that is, accounts that have not been used within the last 30, 60, or any custom number of days.

Move, disable, or delete dormant AD accounts

ADManager Plus with its built-in delete, disable, and move features helps administrators manage AD accounts seamlessly. Administrators can generate reports on inactive users or computers and manage them instantly from the reports.

How it works

AD group cleanup

Sometimes AD users will be added to and removed from AD groups, especially in a complex, dynamic Windows environment. Over time, this may result in groups that have no members. Such empty groups serve no practical purpose and simply add to AD management burdens. Fortunately, ADManager Plus' capabilities extend beyond identifying and deleting or moving user and computer objects. The Groups Without Members report queries AD for all the groups within the selected domains, verifies their membership status, and locates all the empty groups (i.e., groups without any members) in a given domain. After generating the report, admins can take appropriate cleanup actions and delete them right from the report.

GPO cleanup

In most AD environments, there are outdated GPOs. Cleaning up such GPOs is crucial to declutter your AD and keep it organized and secure. If you're wondering how to clean up your AD GPOs effectively, then ManageEngine ADManager Plus is your go-to tool. It's loaded with the following GPO-related reports with built-in options to clean up your GPOs right from the report:

• Disabled GPOs
• Unused GPOs
• Computer Settings Disabled GPOs
• User Settings Disabled GPOs

The Disabled GPOs report provides a list of all GPOs in which both the user and computer configuration settings have been disabled. You can generate a list of group policy objects that aren't being used from the Unused GPOs report. Similarly, the Computer Settings Disabled GPOs and User Settings Disabled GPOs reports enable you to list GPOs with the computer settings disabled and the user settings disabled respectively.

Automate AD cleanup with ADManager Plus

ADManager Plus also takes things up a notch and lets you automate or semi-automate your AD cleanup operations. You can configure multiple automation policies as needed. The key benefit of AD automation is that you can select from any of the predefined automation categories along with the objects that have to be managed and also specify the desired execution time. For instance, you can configure an automation policy that lets you move all the inactive users in a domain to a separate OU once every 3 months, retain them there for 90 days, and then delete those accounts automatically.

Other extensive built-in AD reports in ADManager Plus

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