Active Directory Reporting Software

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

AD reporting provides crucial visibility into user activities, user authentication, access permissions, group memberships, security events, and system configurations within the network environment. Given that Active Directory allows an IT administrator to manage everything from one dashboard, even when there are thousands of objects on a network, having such a clear view of the permissions assigned to users and groups is invaluable.

Without knowing who has access to what, protecting against data breaches from security threats can be significantly more difficult. On the other hand, detailed reports on user and group permissions in your AD allows IT admins to track activity occurring on objects on a network without dedicating hours to manually keeping track of who has access to what. Permission reports are also helpful for managing IT compliance when facing audits for regulations, including:

• SOX
• HIPAA
• GLBA
• GDPR
• PCI DSS

SolarWinds Access Rights Manager is a robust software solution built to help IT teams manage and audit access rights across their IT infrastructure. With the Active Directory access control permissions reporting tool in ARM, IT teams can generate customizable reports to view user permissions and better identify security risks. This feature is designed to improve permission analysis of both groups and individual users.

Additionally, ARM can help admins detect credential misuse by offering relational connections between a user’s given role in the organization and granted permissions. This allows IT to isolate certain parts of the infrastructure from non-privileged accounts and improve protection against potential threats. ARM is also built to automatically generate compliance reports and has the ability to send them directly to internal stakeholders and external auditors on a schedule of your choice.

Yes. SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) AD reporting tool can integrate with Security Event Manager (SEM) and SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) to provide greater visibility into your organization’s security threats and status. A vulnerability and risk dashboard helps you better understand security threats and events across networks, infrastructures, and applications. The security dashboard shows summary widgets from SEM and ARM.

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