Active Directory reporting is necessary to help you gain visibility into your AD environment — which in turn is critical to effective AD management, strong security and compliance, and efficient migrations and consolidations. This page digs deeper into exactly what kind of Active Directory reporting is needed in each of these three areas, as well as what broader features are needed across all of them.
Reporting for Active Directory management
Proper Active Directory management requires keeping a close eye on your AD users and groups, including what permissions have been granted to each, so you can rigorously enforce the least-privilege principle. You also need clear Active Directory reports that identify inactive user and computer accounts, based on properties such as last logon time, so you can clean them up before they are misused. In addition, you need to keep track of user accounts whose passwords are about to expire and spot any accounts whose passwords never expire, since they are at increased risk of being compromised and misused. And you also need to understand your Group Policy settings and be able to easily review how they have changed over time.
More broadly, you need to be able to monitor the configuration of your domain controllers and the replication of data between them. Otherwise, users might well experience problems logging in or accessing the resources they need to do their jobs. While you can get some of the information you need using native tools and Windows PowerShell scripts to export data to Excel spreadsheets, you’ll be spending far more time than necessary on AD administration and still won’t be able to get all the actionable insight you need for truly effective AD management.
You need a reporting tool that delivers in-depth, out-of-the-box reports on your Active Directory users, groups and group membership, roles, organizational units (OUs), and permissions. Such a tool will help you proactively manage your environment. Enterprise Reporter for Active Directory offers automated discovery and reporting on the configuration of Active Directory, and facilitates historical analysis and compliance reporting by saving configuration data and providing detailed change history reports.
Group Policy is a key part of your AD environment and you need deep insight into Group Policy settings and permission. GPOADmin enables you to easily review any GPO and even compare different versions of a GPO side by side.
Reporting for Active Directory security and compliance
Maintaining AD security and proving regulatory compliance are complex tasks. Wading through cryptic native logs and manually piecing information together not only requires a lot of time and effort, it’s also extremely error prone — you’re likely to miss key events and be unable to get the broad perspective you need. Therefore, you need easy-to-read, centralized Active Directory reports and Active Directory change reporting.
Enterprise Reporter for Active Directory makes it easy to keep tabs on what people are doing across the IT environment, and the integrated IT Security Search enables fast incident response and forensic analysis. You can include user entitlements, user activity, event trends, suspicious patterns and more, with rich visualizations and event timelines.
Change Auditor for Active Directory tracks user activity and audit Active Directory changes in real time, alerts you to critical changes so you can respond quickly, and provides easy-to-understand reports with all the critical details. With hundreds of prebuilt, customizable reports for GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, FISMA, GLBA and other mandates, you’ll always be ready for audits. Plus, with InTrust you can archive years of event log data with high compression to meet even the most stringent data retention requirements.
Reporting for Active Directory migrations, consolidations and restructuring
Quality reporting is also critical through all the stages of a migration, consolidation or restructuring project. During the planning phase, you need to understand your current environment (or environments) in detail so you can do any necessary cleanup and plan your migration jobs. During the migration itself, you need to be able to track progress and keep management and other stakeholders informed with reports that are easy to read and understand. And after the migration, you need to report on your target environment to ensure your migration goals were met.
Enterprise Reporter for Active Directory facilitates pre-migration analyses by pinpointing user and group dependencies; spotting unused accounts and groups with no members that are ripe for cleanup; and uncovering matching conflicts that would otherwise throw a monkey wrench into the migration process.
For help not only with pre-migration planning but the migration itself, check out Migration Manager for Active Directory. It will help you develop a comprehensive migration plan, and also offers a robust project management interface for monitoring and reporting on migration progress so you can respond quickly to issues and keep stakeholders up to date.
Where can I learn more about Active Directory?
Active Directory is central to the success of any modern business. Check out these additional helpful pages to learn best practices for the most critical areas of Active Directory:
Resources
Top Seven Reports for Supporting a Growing Virtual Workforce
IT environments are more dynamic than ever, and having more users working from home introduces new vulnerabilities. You undoubtedly want to take full advantage of the tools you already have to strengthen Office 365 security and compliance — but you probably just don’t have the time to go
Read E-bookImprove Your Security Posture with Enterprise Reporter for Active Directory
Enterprise Reporter can help you improve your security posture. This tech brief describes the top 10 AD security reports you should run on a regular basis to reduce your attack surface and thwart attackers.
Read Technical Brief5 Ways to Improve Hybrid Active Directory Auditing
Watch this on-demand webcast and explore five (and maybe more) ways to improve Hybrid AD and Azure AD auditing using the latest features released in Change Auditor and On Demand Audit.
Watch WebcastEnhancing Active Directory Security and Lateral Movement Security
Limit lateral movement by attackers inside your network with these best practices and Quest solutions.
Read E-bookNine Best Practices to Improve Active Directory Security and Cyber Resilience
This ebook explores the anatomy of an AD insider threat and details the best defense strategies against it.
Read E-bookVideos
TEC TALK - Office 365 & Azure Active Directory Security | Quest
Learn how to prioritize Office 365 & Azure AD security for your remote workforce in this TEC Talk presented by Microsoft Certified Master, Sean Metcalf.
Watch VideoTEC Talk: Hardening Privileged Access
Learn steps you can take to secure privileged Active Directory access.
Watch VideoCurrent state of AD security
Join Sean Metcalf, Microsoft Certified Master, as he discusses what organizations are seeing and missing when it comes to Active Directory security.
Watch VideoRecovering from an AD security breach or disaster
Join experts Sean Metcalf and Brian Desmond as they discuss the best practices for quickly dealing with and recovering from AD security breaches.
Watch VideoCommon AD security pitfalls
Join Sean Metcalf, Microsoft Certified Master, as he discusses the most common mistakes organizations make when it comes to Active Directory security.
Watch VideoIs your AD environment safe from the dark side?
See how Quest Software and One Identity can protect your organization from Hank the Hacker and other forces poised to steal AD-controlled credentials and your valuable data.
Watch VideoPrepare for destructive AD cyber-attacks
Learn how you can prepare for – and recover from – a destructive attack on your Active Directory.
Watch VideoHow to reduce AD security risks and insider threats
Hank the Hacker is back and he's ready to attack your Active Directory (AD) environment, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Worse yet, this time he brought friends. With Disgruntled Dan and Careless Craig, he has even more leverage to take control. That's why it's so important to get protected.
Read this informative e-book, Nine Best Practices for AD Security, and discover what you can do to protect your environment from insider threats. Explore:
- Why attackers target AD and how the growing popularity of Office 365 increases the threat
- What an AD security breach means to the organization
- Why it is difficult to secure Active Directory using native auditing alone
- How a typical insider threat unfolds and how to identify common insider threat indicators
- How following nine critical security best practices will help you minimize the risk of the internal threats to the availability, confidentiality and integrity of your AD
Blogs
The anatomy of Active Directory attacks
Learn the most common Active Directory attacks, how they unfold and what steps organizations can take to mitigate their risk.
8 ways to secure your Active Directory environment
Taking the right steps to secure your Active Directory has never been more critical. Learn 8 Active Directory security best practices to reduce your risk.
Active Directory forest: What it is and best practices for managing it
Active Directory forest is a critical — but often underappreciated — element of the IT infrastructure. Learn what it is and how to manage it.
Active Directory disaster recovery: Creating an airtight strategy
Businesses cannot operate without Active Directory up and running. Learn why and how to develop a comprehensive Active Directory disaster recovery strategy.
5 Active Directory migration best practices
Active Directory delivers key authentication services so it’s critical for migrations to go smoothly. Learn 5 Active Directory migration best practices.
Active Directory security groups: What they are and how they improve security
Active Directory security groups play a critical role in controlling access to your vital systems and data. Learn how they work.