Reporting Tool for Active Directory

Active Directory report software is designed to help streamline, automate, and optimize reporting within Active Directory. Do you need to find the last logon time for certain users and accounts? Do you need an Active Directory report for the users within your network who have not logged on within 30 days? Do you need to automatically disable and deprovision accounts that have been inactive for at least 30 days? AD report software can help with these tasks.

AD reporting software enables visibility into how user accounts and group membership are configured, and whether this level of access increases risk or violates security policy compliance. Since Active Directory serves as a central database of user identities and access, it’s essential to build quick and easy AD reporting into user permissions, roles, groups, and other aspects of an Active Directory ecosystem to assess security and compliance posture.

With Active Directory report software, creating clear and comprehensive AD reports can become much easier. You can automate reports on users, group policy objects, computer accounts, and more on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Active Directory (AD) is a Microsoft suite of services designed to help you manage users, objects, and domains in a network environment. With AD, you can organize users into groups, give those groups access privileges to specific directories, and leverage a hierarchical structure for setting privileges.

You can use Active Directory to gain visibility into network activity and gain a complete understanding of how users are interacting with it and how current permissions are set. However, you may also need to see specific subsets of information, like a list of any new user accounts that currently exist. To easily find, organize, and display this information, you can use AD reporting. 

There are many kinds of AD reports, from Active Directory user reports, to IT compliance reports, to a wide variety of permissions reports regarding group policy objects and folders accessible by users and groups.

Some Active Directory permissions reporting can be done manually via scripts in PowerShell. You might want to pull a report on inactive user accounts, newly created users, or some other useful AD information, and PowerShell makes this possible. However, without an automated tool, you’ll need to create your own PowerShell scripts or find them online. After you run the script, the resulting reports should be in Excel or HTML format.

While useful, PowerShell has its limits. Although you can use PowerShell to pull user and group permissions from Active Directory, it’s often not scalable or fast enough to meet the IT needs of a growing enterprise. For scalability and ease of use, it’s best to use a third-party tool to get a report from Active Directory. 

With the AD reporting tools in SolarWinds Access Rights Manager, you can more easily generate customizable reports to pull the information you need. For instance, you can use a report to view user permissions and more easily identify security risks. ARM includes PowerShell scripting, but also provides automated templates so you don’t have to spend time figuring out what script is right for your needs. 

In addition, ARM generates compliance reports and can automatically send them to auditors or internal stakeholders at any time. For more information about the specifics of creating Active Directory user reports in ARM, consult this documentation.

AD reporting tools help you monitor, manage, and analyze permissions in Active Directory by offering a comprehensive overview of the objects and user permissions on the network, including users, groups, computers, and folder access rights. This helps you stay organized, demonstrate compliance for auditors, and reduce cybersecurity risks caused by credential misuse.

AD reporting tools allow you to more easily generate reports from both a user and a group perspective. These tools can also show you the groups that individual users belong to and identify the network objects that each user can access. With this information, you can manage your permissions more effectively and grant, modify, or delete access to certain objects within your network as you see fit. This is useful for enforcing the principle of least privilege and responding to security events. 

Beyond generating pre-built and custom AD reports, some core functions of top Active Directory reporting tools include:

• Automating reports and other related actions
• Exporting AD reports as CSV, XLS, DOC, or PDF files
• Retrieving account status 
• Determining last logon time
• Identifying computer accounts that are locked, have non-expiring passwords, or otherwise need attention
• Performing bulk actions, such as deleting or moving objects

For any size business, managing AD permissions can get complicated very quickly. Active Directory permissions reports help you gain a clearer understanding of your environment and how user and group permissions are assigned within it. 

AD permissions reports offer a comprehensive breakdown of who has access to what resources, and under what circumstances, within your network. This can help you track activity around sensitive data and keep an eye out for internal and external security threats or data. Also, AD reporting can make it easier to demonstrate compliance with regulations like SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, GDPR, and PCI DSS.

Since AD permissions reporting is critical for demonstrating compliance, it’s important to be confident in the data reported. Additionally, many auditors expect fast turnaround times. Manually producing reports can be time-consuming and prone to human error.

Compliance requirements sometimes focus on credentials and how they’re used, configured, and managed. This data may not always be easy to pull from Active Directory, so using a third-party tool that can automatically run and send reports according to your schedule can help you ensure you deliver quick and accurate reports to auditors. AD reporting with Active Directory permissions reporting tools like SolarWinds ARM can help you minimize and eliminate common compliance reporting pain points.

SolarWinds Access Rights Manager is built to be an affordable and agile AD reporting solution designed to help you more easily manage permissions and accounts in Active Directory, streamline and automate reporting, and demonstrate compliance.

By digging into user and group permissions, you can get a clearer picture of your network and make more informed decisions. ARM’s intuitive, user-friendly interface lets you easily create user accounts and review user and group access across systems, data, and files. If you need to change access rights, you can do that with just a few clicks. 

ARM can also help you protect your network from internal and external security threats by helping you monitor user permissions, so you can quickly identify instances of unauthorized privilege escalation attempts and respond quickly to thwart insider threats. Also, ARM lets you instantly deprovision accounts in response to alerts, security incidents, or other ad-hoc requests, which can help you identify, manage, and mitigate risk better than ever before.

This Active Directory permissions reporting tool can also make demonstrating compliance easier by allowing you to more easily monitor user account configurations to show compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI, and automatically send templated or custom reports to auditors. 

Other SolarWinds Tools to help administer and monitor Active Directory:

• Security Event Manager
• Server & Application Monitor
• Dameware Remote Support

Other Features:

• Active Directory Management
• Active Directory Auditing
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• NTFS Permissions Management
• NTFS Permissions Report
• Cybersecurity Risk Management