You probably know that you can record changes made to Active Directory and Group Policy objects by enabling auditing. But extracting the information that interests you can be quite cumbersome. You can use a more sophisticated event log management tool such as EventSentry or GFiEventsManager. However, if you just want to stay informed about which Active Directory objects have been changed, you might like NetWrix Active Directory Change Reporter.
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There is a free and a commercial version. The limitations of the free version become obvious when you use the tool for the first time. There is a link to the commercial version at those spots where features have been cut. The main difference is that the free edition doesn’t allow you to see exactly when a certain object was changed and by whom. Thus, you will only be aware of the type of changes on a certain day. I think that this will often be sufficient. If you recognize a suspicious change, you can always check the security event log for more information.
Active Directory Change Reporter is a very simple tool. You just need a minute or two to configure it. The screenshot shows all the settings it supports. By default, the tool will send a report of all changes to your email account every day at 3 AM. You can change this by configuring the corresponding entry in the Windows scheduler. To try Active Change Reporter, you can right click on the scheduled task and navigate to “run”. You can also generate HTML reports manually with the NetWrix AD Change Report Viewer, which you will find in the Start Menu.
Note that you have to enable auditing before you will be able to record changes. You can find a description of how to do this in the help file under “troubleshooting”.
I like this usefull tool. A new version is available with Exchange reporting.
Thanks for the hint. I might have a look at it soon.