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Change Auditor for Windows File Servers

Windows file server tool tracks, audits, reports and alerts on vital changes

Your Microsoft Windows file servers contain critical and sensitive information. But, it’s difficult to track and enforce who has access to which documents, resulting in violations of information security policies and misuse of access rights. Issues can result in costly service disruptions and crippling network downtime. To avoid these problems, you need to be notified — in real time — of critical changes to your Windows file servers.

Quest® Change Auditor for Windows File Servers drives the security and control of Windows file servers by tracking all key file and folder changes in real time. You will instantly know the “who, what, when, where and originating workstation” details, and get the original and current values for fast troubleshooting. Control and audit changes to Microsoft Windows file servers efficiently and cost-effectively.

Centralized auditing

Monitor and audit all file server changes from multiple servers and locations all from one single console.

At-a-glance display

Track user and admin activity with original and current values for change events.

Change Auditor Threat Detection

Detect insider threats proactively with user behavior analytics and reduce the noise of false positive alerts.

Share auditing

Ensure admins have access to shared files by capturing change events in real time.

Object protection

Protect against changes to critical files and folders from being modified or accidentally deleted.

Real-time alerts on the move

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

Integrated event forwarding

Integrate with SIEM solutions to forward Change Auditor events to Splunk, ArcSight or QRadar.

Auditor-ready reporting

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

Features

Quest InTrust integration

Integrate with Quest InTrust for 20:1 compressed event storage and aggregating native or third-party logs.

Improved security insights

Correlate disparate IT data from numerous systems and devices into IT Security Search, 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.

Superior 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 Windows environment for better forensic analysis and security incident response.

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.

Web-based access

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

Stevie Awards 2018 People’s Choice winner

In the 2018 Stevie Award’s People Choice awards, Change Auditor was voted best software and also won a Silver Stevie for best new product of 2018.

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 SP2

Microsoft SQL Server 2017

NOTE: Change Auditor supports SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups and SQL 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

Windows Server 2019

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 .