Simple and Cheap AD Reporting.
Updated February 22, 2024
Simple and Cheap AD Reporting.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ManageEngine ADAudit Plus
We use AdAudit to centrally repository all Active Directory user and system events. And do monthly, quarterly, and yearly reporting on user interactions, permission changes, account creations, and deletions. And for helping find where people get locked out. Great tool for AD reporting all around! You can create reports in various file formats; pdf, csv, xls, etc for the necessary consumption needs.
- AD reporting.
- Live user account event research and review.
- network drive access permission changes.
- some of the reports have bugs and have been long-standing issues not resolved for years.
- web portal has not really changed in look & feel in years.
- not always the easiest to customize reports.
- We added quarterly AD user reporting to our financial auditing process easily.
- We added monthly user account membership reviewing.
- Added the ability to troubleshoot user lockout ad hoc to IT controls.
Group membership reviewing, quarterly user access control reporting, and account lockout controls have been the biggest visibility improvements with this software. It is really easy and scalable to handle user and network growth. Even the ability to add other reports from existing data is handy.
We only use the reporting tools for users and file shares for group permissions. We have the other advanced AD reporting features for AD admin controls we do not use. Though we acknowledge, they exist and can be leveraged. For what we use, this tool is very cheap and very effective in completing report analysis timely and effective.
We do not use any of the time and session-based reports. This is out of the scope of our requirements.
From a user security and monitoring perspective, this tool is very helpful and easy to use. From a Window Server and operation, I see no changes to behavior. Over the course of 5 years, we have upgraded from Windows Server 2016 to 2019 and this year to 2022. Nothing changed in the backend functionality, reporting, or options in AdAudit.
Nothing has changed over time in any of the reporting and features we use in the product. We just noticed some of the reports have improvements in their cleanliness of reporting and bug fixes.
ManageEngine is very cheaper to get into and expand its use. It's a robust but not quite as powerful application as something like Quest or others. But for the most prevalent and needed, AD reporting requirements will meet your needs and expectations.
Do you think ManageEngine ADAudit Plus delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with ManageEngine ADAudit Plus's feature set?
Yes
Did ManageEngine ADAudit Plus live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of ManageEngine ADAudit Plus go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy ManageEngine ADAudit Plus again?
Yes
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus Feature Ratings
Using ManageEngine ADAudit Plus
5 - The users of ADAudit are in the IT team; all IT Administrators and the IT Manager. We use it for auditing logging, expiration, group management, account lockouts, and a number of other quarterly and yearly reports. The reports we generate are used by our finance team, executive team, and external auditors.
2 - The two IT Administrators we have here cover all AD, Exchange, network, database, virtualization and WAN networking. And, are the senior administrators for all higher level Active Directory configuration. Which means we make sure the reports generated from ADAudit are complete, accurate, and up to date for reporting and consumption purposes.
- Account Review
- Quarterly/Yearly reporting and auditing
- Permission issues and tech support logging
- Troubleshooting login issues from odd source devices. account lockout management
- Troubleshooting vpn via NPS
- File audit logging for network drives
- If and when we get to M365 we can use it for auditing
- 3rd Party m365 auditing
- Any new external auditor report requests
Evaluating ManageEngine ADAudit Plus and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
ADAudit price point is low compared to Quest and other AD management tools. The out of box software features in the base price is far better than competitors so it was a simple decision to pick ManageEngine. I would happily go back and buy this software again.
I would not change my decision or license options. The software does what we need it to!
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - We implemented ADAudit where it gets ad event logs only and does not provide any self service options nor any advanced AD admin management options to impact setup, configuration, nor general administration. For us, it was easy to bolt this on and train and use post setup.
- VM requirements (minor)
- AD version and configuration tweaks for the software
- how to set up the software with an external SQL DB
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success | Escalation required |
No we did not. This software is not a priority application for IT nor users. So normal support included with the software is all we need!
Yes - We updated ADAudit many times and have found issues during and right after the update. We've opened cases with support and they have been prompt, resourceful and applied a workaround or fix usually within a couple hours to at most a day.
We did a software update 2 years ago which was needed because we found a problem in the software on the previous patch. This update was supposed to fix the issue. After updating we found a new problem and support gave us a workaround fix until the next future update would come out with this new issue fixed in it. Great support to date!
Using ManageEngine ADAudit Plus
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Easy to use Consistent | Requires technical support Lots to learn |
- Canned reports are easy to generate, print and review
- Filtering AD content and generate custom reports or filtered reports is easy to do
- Viewing new AD group content and reports right after account/group creation is easy to do.
- Patching the software and sometimes when there are errors updating the software its not easy to resolve without tech support help
- Custom report creation is difficult to learn and takes some learned AD experience to create them
- Understanding licensing isn't that easy to navigate since there are a lot of license add-ons available
- There is no holistic interface for the ManageEngine portals to cohesively manage all of them together and centrally navigate between
Yes - You can poke your ADAudit web portal externally if you need to. but i don't recommend it as that's a security risk you should not need to do. IT Admins i don't believe need a mobile client to do their job for staff. However, the web interface from domain machines is far powerful enough to do anything they need for staff.