SharePoint Online Audit Log Tool

SharePoint audit logs are records of events, operations, and changes over time in SharePoint, which is a widely used content management and collaboration tool. SharePoint online audit logs can tell you who accessed which elements of SharePoint, when they accessed those elements, and what actions they performed during their time in the platform. This can include operations such as:

• Opened, viewed, or downloaded documents and items
• Items moved and copied to another location in the site collection
• Edits and modifications made to accounts, permissions, and audit settings
• Deleted or restored items and audit log events
• Checked out and in items
• Audit log search queries

By sorting, filtering, and analyzing the data present in a SharePoint online audit log, you can understand relevant and important events.

SharePoint also enables you to create native audit log reports. However, there are limitations to these reports—for instance, they can only list users assigned permissions to site collection and won’t list user effective permissions. Built-in audit log reports also don’t offer easy-to-read details on critical permission changes. This can make it very difficult and time-consuming to determine whether a specific user’s permissions are appropriate.

SharePoint security audits are important for maintaining regulatory compliance and organizational security. Because the application enables you to share sensitive information for the sake of internal and external collaboration, it’s important to secure and define user access levels. Without a proper system in place for managing user access control, your enterprise’s proprietary information could easily be endangered.

Anything from siloed team members to complex and inefficient operations could result in data loss, theft, and mismanagement. By knowing who has access to sensitive files, you can better prevent data leakage and other security risks. It’s also important to know who has access to backups, specific machines, and report exporting capabilities. A SharePoint security audit can help you determine these audit settings and optimize them for improved security.

It’s critical to clearly define SharePoint user and admin roles as well as access controls. But this list can get messy very quickly—especially for bigger enterprises with many large systems, file stores, and data repositories. This is why it’s important to take a holistic and proactive approach when auditing SharePoint for security and compliance, and perform these audits regularly.

A SharePoint permissions audit tool works by giving you deep insights into SharePoint operations and modifications, as well as who conducted those tasks and when, via audit logs and trails. This enables you to discover suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access and credential abuse, so you can quickly investigate and respond to cybersecurity risks.

Many SharePoint permissions audit tools are made to monitor access and specify how often an attempt to connect is made, along with how long the connection takes. A SharePoint online audit tool could also help you determine the maximum number of scan attempts before cancelation, plus support other processes for ending access when it’s no longer needed. This enables you to further protect the important data in SharePoint files and folders.

Many SharePoint audit tools enable you to simplify compliance with automated reporting capabilities. These reports can help you understand and evaluate how a user’s access rights could impact security or compliance. You can also exclude various items—including administrators, owners, and secondary contacts, as well as list access and hidden lists—from a report, view, or scan as needed.

The SharePoint permissions audit tool in SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) works by communicating with SharePoint via Microsoft components, which are tailored to the specific SharePoint system in use. Through this design, ARM enables you to retrieve SharePoint online audit logs and perform proper analysis on them. In turn, ARM helps enable you to understand critical events in SharePoint and assess their risk.

ARM is built to let you easily generate audit reports for analyzing user and admin activities. You could view critical audit settings and user activity with ARM reports, including who invited external users to access internal resources and which of those external users accessed them. Through these reports, ARM enables you to easily find out who shares which data and who accesses it regularly.

You could also run a SharePoint scan on ARM. To do this, you’ll need to configure two types of accounts:

• A process account, which enables you to execute the scan process on a selected collector. Your process account needs to have local administrative rights as well as interactive logon privileges to work.
• A scan account, which is used for the actual scan itself.

To add a SharePoint on-premises resource, the account must be the same as the owner account registered for site collection. To add a SharePoint online resource, the scan account requires site admin permissions. Through letting you access SharePoint online and on-premises, ARM is designed to be a complete and comprehensive SharePoint audit tool.

Other SolarWinds Tools to Help With SharePoint Management:

• Server & Application Monitor

Related Features:

• OneDrive for Business Management
• Exchange Auditing
• Auditing Software for Active Directory
• Windows File Server Auditing
• IT Security Audits