Active Directory change auditing

AD change auditing with ADAudit Plus

What is AD change auditing

Every AD object (user accounts, security groups, computer accounts, organizational units, Group Policy Objects, and permissions) can be created, modified, moved, or deleted by any administrator or delegated user in your environment. Change auditing is the practice of recording each of those events with enough context to answer four questions: what changed, who changed it, when the change occurred, and from which machine.

ADAudit Plus captures that context automatically across every monitored domain controller, without requiring custom scripts for each object type. Changes are correlated across DCs in real time, stored centrally, and surfaced as pre-configured reports that are ready to use.

Key changes ADAudit Plus captures across your AD environment

 

 

Use our library of over 50 predefined alert profiles to notify admins about critical changes to domain policies, admin groups, configuration permissions, and more

Monitor privileged user activity

ADAudit Plus gives you continuous visibility into the actions of privileged accounts.

• Audit every administrative action across AD schema, users, groups, OUs, GPOs, and configuration settings, maintaining a clear and detailed record of what each privileged user did, when, and from where
• Configure alerts on high-priority events and accelerate forensic investigations with reports that surface the who, what, when, and where of every privileged user action

 

 

Gain visibility into changes to users, groups, computers, organizational units (OUs), and more by a privileged user

Identify anomalies with UBA

The UBA engine and risk assessment module analyze logon patterns, file activity, user management actions, and privilege usage to surface anomalies and flag accounts that warrant closer scrutiny.

• Detect unusual spikes in logon failures, lockouts, and file operations, first-time host access, new remote server connections, and new processes running on a host; all key indicators of abnormal or potentially malicious activity
• Flag activity outside expected hours across logons, user management actions, and file operations, where timing alone can indicate unauthorized access
• Track privilege usage at the individual level and alert when a user exercises a privilege for the first time, catching escalation attempts before they reach critical systems

 

 

Leverage UBA to detect atypical user behavior such as an unusual volume of user management activities, unusual user activity time, and more

Extend auditing to Entra ID and hybrid environments

The Cloud auditing module extends your audit coverage beyond on-premises AD to Entra ID, giving you a unified view of user and administrator activity across both environments from a single console.

• Audit successful and failed logons across Entra ID, including account lockouts, disabled account logon attempts, and MFA-enabled logon failures, with correlated context such as a user's on-premises Distinguished Name, SID, and GUID linking cloud activity back to your AD environment
• Track user, device, and group management actions including password changes, dynamic group membership updates, and the assignment and removal of roles; with alerts on high-impact events such as a user being assigned the Global Administrator role
• Monitor application changes, API consent grants, and license assignments and expirations across your Entra ID environment to surface unauthorized access expansions and catch unintended entitlement changes

Back up and restore your AD objects

The AD Backup and Recovery add-on safeguards your environment against accidental deletions, unauthorized modifications, and other incidents by maintaining restorable snapshots of your AD objects.

• Back up and restore a comprehensive range of AD objects including users, computers, groups and group memberships, OUs, GPOs, schema objects, and more.
• Revert changes to user, computer, and OU objects directly from audit reports, covering events such as deletions, creations, moves, renames, and attribute-level changes without leaving the ADAudit Plus console.

Meet compliance requirements

ADAudit Plus simplifies compliance reporting with pre-built templates and flexible customization, giving auditors exactly the data they need without relying on IT to build queries from scratch.

• Access pre-configured compliance reports for SOX, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FISMA, GLBA, GDPR, and ISO 27001, each mapped to the standard's specific change monitoring requirements and ready to export on demand
• Build custom report profiles by combining specific users, audit actions, object types, and time ranges into a saved view that runs on demand, so recurring audit requests are answered instantly without manual intervention
• Automate report generation and delivery to designated recipients on a defined schedule, ensuring compliance evidence is consistently captured and distributed without depending on manual exports before every audit cycle

Why native tools fall short

ADAudit Plus eliminates the complexity of native Windows auditing by automating the heavy lifting that would otherwise require scripting expertise, manual log correlation, and careful security configuration.

• Aggregate audit data from domain controllers, Windows servers, workstations, file servers, Entra ID, and NAS devices into a single repository, without the deployment complexity of Windows Event Forwarding
• Replace manual event correlation and PowerShell scripting with built-in reports that surface before and after values of AD changes, GPO display names, etc
• Define threshold-based alerts for critical activities such as logons from disabled accounts, and execute automated response scripts to contain incidents before they escalate
• Retain audit data long term to meet regulatory requirements, with alerts that notify you when a configured computer stops sending logs or when event logs are cleared, closing the gaps that native log size limits and WEC server downtime leave open

4 compelling reasons to choose ADAudit Plus