How to generate security audit reports in Active Directory?

Microsoft's Active Directory technology is the foundation of identity and access management in Microsoft Windows Server based IT infrastructures as it stores and protects all vital components of security including user accounts, security groups, group policies and even computer accounts.

 

It thus plays a vital role in security and compliance auditing and thus organizations often have a need to generate and know how to generate security audit reports in Active Directory. These reports often form an integral component of an organization's overall security audit and regulatory compliance reporting apparatus. These reports often cover user account management, security group management, and even delegated administrative access management.

 

IT administrative personnel are often tasked with generating such reports and with the right Active Directory reporting tools, they can often generate these reports quickly, reliably and in a form that is required by IT managers and IT auditors. IT admins can also write PowerShell scripts for Active Directory or LDAP scripts to generate these reports but most often, writing such scripts can be time-consuming and error-prone and thus many IT admins often choose to use a 3rd party reporting solution to fulfill such needs.

 

On a related subejct, IT administrators also need to know how to audit and report security in Active Directory, and to do so, they often either rely on using custom inbuilt scripts or using 3rd party automated management tools as Microsoft unfortunately does not seem to provide appropriate tools to do so. Fortunately, there are some very helpful and useful 3rd party Active Directory reporting tools available that can assist IT admins in making this job easy and efficient for them to carry out.