ManageEngine ADAudit Plus Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

Capability to audit even minute changes that have happened on domain controllers (users, computers, Groups, GPOs, PSOs, DNS Zones) and on user workstations.

Not having the option to add in bulk workstations for auditing.

We have integration with various products and mainly from our helpdesk. We use this to monitor changes to user accounts - we have some restricted groups for access to some systems, so if someone copies a user and the new user should not be in one of these groups, it blocks it and alerts us. Useful for tracking locked accounts as to where/why they are being locked. We use it daily to check failed logins, for example when someone with an expired password (or leaver) has left a PC logged in generating thousands of audit failures in AD. We can then identify and resolve these easily.

Setup for some of the above can be quite complex and we can sometimes catch ourselves out if the rules are too strict. (Manually adding someone to a group and forgetting we restricted it for example).

I like the amount of data that ADAudit Plus can gather. It can pull your file server auditing, your domain controller auditing, and a whole host of other things. You can also setup alerting on specific events that makes it easy to see what's happening with your servers.

The upgrade process is the worst thing I've ever seen in a software product. You have to put your build number into the support website, download a major upgrade, install that, and then download a service pack, and install that. It doesn't sound so bad, but the upgrade process itself is dependent on this antiquated process that uses a batch file and a Java utility. It fails more often than not and the upgrade instructions listed on ManageEngine's website has inaccurate data (lists the wrong batch files to use, etc).

It has a lot of reports already on it. You can use report templates to create a report. For active directory but in same time you can use for auditing file servers. It has DNS auditing and Exchange users and groups too.

Archiving model isn't very useful. It isn't easy to take something from archived logs.

AD Auditing is only a necessity for regulatory requirements and when you need it the most. However, AD Audit also provides intuitive reporting functionality for those times you can't easily give a quick answer, AD Audit is there for you.

Some of the upgrades are a bit of a pain due to services, and it's hard to install multiple products on the same server due to port usage and service installations.