Friday, June 26, 2009

Active Directory Auditing in Windows Server 2008

Windows operating system (OS), the features available to enable and monitor auditing for Active Directory (AD) have been relatively limited. Nine general categories of auditing have traditionally been available, all of which result in a fairly coarse level of logging to the Microsoft Windows server Event Log. By combined only a little number of log categories, the result of enabling logging is a lengthy amount of extra data that must be managed in order to capture modify actions of interest. At the same time, auditing requirements brought about by industry and governmental compliance regulations have increased the criticality for effective and consistent logging in many network environments.

Microsoft’s release of Windows Server 2008, modify logging benifit new levels of granularity associated with configurable event categories and subcategories, although a new Windows Event Log improves the process of clarify for and locating events of interest. AD itself gains four new logging subcategories that assist with the monitoring of configuration changes and replication in addition to object accesses.

we are explaining these paragraph will discuss the new audit capabilities specific to AD gained through an upgrade to Windows Server 2008. It will provide specific guidance and step-by-step instructions to assist user's, the administrator, with making best use of AD’s new auditing features.

Enabling Auditing in Windows Server 2008:
The mathode to enable modifying in Windows Server 2008 arrives comparatively unchanged from its updation in previous OS versions. Enabling the basic auditing of AD events on domain controllers is most often performed using Group Policy through modification of the native Default Domain Controllers Policy. Enabling auditing in this manner ensures that auditing settings are configured consistently across all domain controllers. Figure 1 shows a configured policy as seen within the Group Policy Management Editor.

Windows Server 2008 New Auditing Subcategories:
The problem with these nine categories in previous versions of the Windows OS was that they didn’t provide the level of granularity needed by many administrators. Enabling the Audit account management category effectively turned on auditing for all types of account management activities. If you were interested in only auditing for user account management and had no interest in computer account management, we were stuck with wading through the extra data associated with its Event Log entries.

With Microsoft Windows Server 2008, the real nine contain are beaked into 50 audit policy subcategories. These subcategories allow for exact control over the types of

events logged into the Security Event Log. The various each of some new subcategories and their relation to the original nine audit policies. As you’ll learn, knowing the name of each subcategory and its relation to its category is important for the command-line tool used to enable them.


Source: http://cc.realtimepublishers.com/tips/understanding-active-directory-auditing-in-windows.php

2 comments:

Jhon Drake said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
james marsh said...

Great blog post, thanks for sharing this information related to active directory auditing. This topic describes to enable auditing of active directory events and manage active directory changes. I tried this active directory auditing tool from https://www.netwrix.com/active_directory_auditing.html. This tool allows to audit AD changes and provides Who, What, When and Where information for all changes. It generates the comprehensive reports to track all suspicious changes and view structural changes through Active Directory State Reports .

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