Active Directory change monitoring

AD change monitoring with ADAudit Plus

What is AD change monitoring?

AD is the central authority for identity and access in most Windows environments. Every user account, group membership, Group Policy setting, and permission assignment flows through it, so any unauthorized or accidental change can have immediate consequences for security and operations. Monitoring those changes in real time is the only reliable way to keep an accurate picture of who has access to what, and to catch problems before they spread.

ADAudit Plus gives you real-time visibility into every AD change event, capturing the full context of each action: the object modified, the attribute affected, the user who made the change, the domain controller (DC) that recorded it, and the source machine. That level of detail is available across all major AD object types, from user and group management through GPOs, permissions, DNS, and schema.

Key changes ADAudit Plus monitors in AD

Track changes across all AD objects

ADAudit Plus captures changes across the full range of AD objects through pre-configured reports, each structured around the who-what-when-where of the change rather than raw event log entries. Every report surfaces the caller identity, the DC that recorded the event, the source machine, and the exact time.

• Track changes to users including every password reset alongside the identity of the administrator who initiated it.
• Capture group membership changes across security groups with the caller identity and source machine.
• Track OU creation, deletion, and movement events, plus DNS record additions, modifications, and deletions.
• Detect schema and FSMO role changes, which affect the entire forest and should be tightly controlled.

 

 

Track changes to user account attributes with complete visibility into the modified attribute name, previous and updated values, initiating user, and the precise time of modification.

Audit Group Policy and permission changes

GPOs control security settings, software deployment, and access configurations across every machine in the domain. A single unauthorized GPO change can weaken password requirements, relax lockout thresholds, or remove security restrictions across thousands of endpoints at once. ADAudit Plus captures every GPO change at both the object level and the setting level, with permission changes tracked at the same depth.

• Capture GPO creation, deletion, and link changes with the identity and source machine of whoever made them.
• Track changes to password policy, account lockout policy, and security settings within GPOs, with before-and-after values.
• Monitor permission changes at the domain, OU, GPO, user, group, and computer level.
• Track AdminSDHolder Permission Changes as a named, distinct event, because any modification propagates silently to protected accounts.
• Scan DCs, Windows Servers, and workstations against 350+ predefined benchmark settings to identify GPO misconfigurations and potential exposure points across the environment.

 

 

Gain an in-depth, at-a-glance view of GPO-based risk exposure across multiple systems to quickly identify the most vulnerable endpoints in your domain.

Monitor privileged user activity

Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, and Schema Admins have access to every part of your AD environment. Their activity is the highest-priority audit area in most security frameworks, and also where unauthorized or accidental changes carry the greatest risk.

ADAudit Plus maintains a consolidated audit trail of every action taken by privileged accounts across all AD object types: user management, group changes, GPO modifications, permission assignments, and schema updates.

• Review privileged account changes in a centralized audit trail.
• Track Schema Admin activity, which should be rare and tightly controlled in healthy AD environments.
• Detect privileged account activity occurring outside normal business hours using UBA-driven anomaly detection.

 

 

Track changes made by privileged users to AD objects, including users, groups, computers, OUs, and more.

Detect anomalies with UBA and threats with Attack Surface Analyzer

The Attack Surface Analyzer detects 25+ named AD attacks in real time, including brute-force attacks, Golden Ticket attacks, DCSync, RID hijacking, and more.

User behavior analytics (UBA) uses machine learning to establish a behavioral baseline for every user by analyzing patterns such as typical logon times, commonly accessed systems, authentication behavior, and the frequency and timing of administrative actions. Deviations from this baseline are automatically identified and surfaced in the Analytics tab without requiring manual threshold configuration.

• Unusual Volume of Logon Failures detects abnormal spikes in failed authentication attempts compared to a user's normal activity, helping identify potential brute-force attacks or compromised credentials.
• Unusual Volume of User Management Activity flags unexpected increases in account creation, modification, or deletion activity performed by administrators, helping detect suspicious administrative behavior.
• Unusual Volume of File Activity and Unusual Volume of File Deletions identify spikes in file operations that exceed established user baselines, helping uncover potential ransomware activity or data exfiltration attempts before significant damage occurs.

Get real-time alerts on critical AD changes

Audit reports tell you what happened. Alerts tell you what is happening now, before the impact spreads. ADAudit Plus ships with pre-configured alert profiles covering the most critical AD change events, all of which you can adjust to match your environment's risk tolerance.

Every alert delivers email and SMS notification to the responsible team. When a configured alert fires, ADAudit Plus can automatically create a ticket in ServiceNow, Jira, or another connected ITSM platform, so the response workflow starts without manual handoff.

• When a domain policy is modified, your team is notified immediately, so unauthorized changes to security baselines are caught before they affect the environment.
• When a user is added to a privileged group like Domain Admins, an alert fires in real time, giving your team the window to verify whether the change was authorized.
• When the security audit log is cleared on any DC, you are alerted at once, because log clearing is one of the clearest indicators of an active compromise attempt.

Meet compliance requirements with audit-ready reports

SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA, GLBA, GDPR, and ISO 27001 all require documented evidence that access to critical systems is monitored, that changes are tracked, and that audit records are retained. ADAudit Plus ships with pre-configured compliance reports for all seven standards, mapped to the specific controls each framework requires.

When standard reports don't fit your audit scope, custom report profiles let you combine specific users, audit actions, object types, and time ranges into saved views that can be scheduled for automatic delivery to auditors and compliance officers. Every report exports to CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX.

Why native tools fall short

Windows Security event logs record AD change events, but working with them natively creates three significant gaps.

• First, logs are stored locally on each DC. In a multi-DC environment, correlating events across all of them requires manual collection or scripting, and that process is not audit-ready by default.
• Second, the raw event log format is not designed for investigation. Security event 4738 tells you that a user account was changed; it does not present the before-and-after attribute values in a readable format without significant post-processing.
• Third, retention is limited by the configured log size. Once the security log fills and overwrites older events, that historical record is gone unless a separate archiving process is in place.

ADAudit Plus centralizes event collection from all DCs, translates raw event data into structured, searchable reports with before-and-after values, and retains audit data according to your compliance requirements, without manual scripting or log management overhead.