Change Auditor for Active Directory

Learn about Change Auditor for Active Directory

Monitor AD for improved security and compliance

Change Auditor for Active Directory helps ensure the security, compliance and control of AD and Azure AD. The solution proactively protects objects and tracks all changes in real time with complete visibility. Easily detect insider attacks and accidental changes with reports, alerts and visibility into events and actions without the complexity of native tools.

Features
Tour
Specifications
Resources
Support & Services

Features

Proactive threat detection with Change Auditor Threat Detection

Simplify user threat detection by analyzing anomalous activity to rank the highest risk users in your organization, identify potential threats and reduce the noise from false positive alerts.

Hybrid environment auditing with a correlated view

Audit Active Directory and Azure AD environments. Change Auditor provides a single, correlated view of activity across hybrid AD environments, ensuring visibility of all changes taking place in your environment whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Improved insights with IT Security Search

Correlate disparate IT data from numerous systems and devices into an interactive search engine for fast security incident response and forensic analysis. Include user entitlements and activity, event trends, suspicious patterns and more with rich visualizations and event timelines.

At-a-glance display

Track user and administrator activity with detailed information including who, what, when, where, which workstation and why for change events, plus original and current values for all changes.

Auditor-ready reporting

Generate comprehensive reports for best practices and regulatory compliance mandates for GDPR, SOX, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FISMA, GLBA and more.

AD-change rollback

Restore previous values on unauthorized, mistaken or improper changes with the click of a button, directly in the Change Auditor console, honoring the rights and privileges of the user requesting the rollback.

Account lockout

Capture the originating IP address/workstation name for account lockout events to simplify troubleshooting.

Object protection

Protect against changes to the most critical Active Directory objects, such as accidentally deleted OUs and modified GPO settings.

High-performance auditing engine

Remove auditing limitations and captures change information without the need for native audit logs, resulting in faster results and significant savings of storage resources.

Security timelines

View, highlight and filter change events and discover their relation to other security events in chronological order across your AD and Azure AD environment for better forensic analysis and security incident response.

Integrated event forwarding

Easily integrate with SIEM solutions to forward Change Auditor events to Splunk, HP Arcsight or IBM QRadar. Additionally, Change Auditor integrates with Quest InTrust for long-term 20:1 compressed event storage and aggregation of native or third-party logs to reduce storage costs on SIEM forwarding and create a highly-compressed log repository.

Role-based access

Configure access so auditors can run searches and reports without making any configuration changes to the application, and without requiring the assistance and time of the administrator.

Real-time alerts on the move

Send critical change and pattern alerts to email and mobile devices to prompt immediate action, enabling you to respond faster to threats even while you're not on site.

Web-based access with dashboard reporting

Search from anywhere using a web browser and creates targeted dashboard reports to provide upper management and auditors with access to the information they need without having to understand architecture or administration.

Tour

Alerts

Alert on and monitor critical changes made to Active Directory.

Group Policy

Alert on and monitor critical changes made to Group Policy objects.

Account lockout

Receive alerts when accounts are locked.

Object protection

Prevent changes to critical objects and settings.

Role-based access

Provide role-based access to control who can do or see what.

Specifications

Change Auditor System Requirements

There are specific system requirements for the Change Auditor coordinator (server-side), Change Auditor client (client-side), Change Auditor agent (server-side), and the Change Auditor workstation and web client (optional components). For a full list of system requirements and required permissions for all components and target systems that can be audited by Change Auditor please refer to the Change Auditor Installation Guide.

Change Auditor Coordinator Requirements (Server-side component)

The Change Auditor coordinator is responsible for fulfilling client and agent requests and for generating alerts.

Processor: Quad core Intel® Core™ i7 equivalent or better

Memory: Minimum: 8 GB RAM or better
Recommended: 32 GB RAM or better

SQL Server

SQL databases supported up to the following versions:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP3
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP4
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP2

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP1
Microsoft SQL Server 2017

NOTE: Change Auditor does not support SQL high availability technology other than clusters.

Operating system

Installation platforms (x64) supported up to the following versions:

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2016

NOTE: Microsoft Windows Data Access Components (MDAC) must be enabled. (MDAC is part of the operating system and enabled by default.)

Coordinator software and configuration

For the best performance, Quest strongly recommends:

Install the Change Auditor coordinator on a dedicated member server.

The Change Auditor database should be configured on a separate, dedicated SQL server instance.

NOTE: Do NOT pre-allocate a fixed size for the Change Auditor database.

In addition, the following software/configuration is required:

The coordinator must have LDAP and GC connectivity to all domain controllers in the local domain and the forest root domain.
x64 version of Microsoft’s .NET 4.6.1

x64 version of Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 6.0
x64 version of Microsoft SQLXML 4.0

Coordinator footprint

Estimated hard disk space used: 1 GB.
Coordinator RAM usage is highly dependent on the environment, number of agent connections, and event volume.
Estimated database size will vary depending on the number of agents deployed and audited events captured.

Additional Account Coordinator minimum permissions required, please see Change Auditor Installation Guide .