Active Directory Reports
Being able to see and understand what's going on in your environment is essential to keeping it healthy. This is why Adaxes offers a reporting feature with practically limitless capabilities. It can be useful to absolutely everyone who interacts with your directory – from administrators and help desk technicians to users who only need to maintain a couple of groups they own.
Do department managers want to know which of their team members have out-of-office replies enabled in Exchange? How about your IT staff that needs to see all user accounts created in the last two weeks? What if auditors request a list of user accounts that don't have an employee ID set? Adaxes reports cover all of these cases and many others.
The Web interface enables access to any report about your environment from the convenience of a web browser. All the information your users are looking for is presented in an easily digestible form – they can sort, group, and filter report results as they see fit to effortlessly analyze the data.
If they need to share the report with someone or preserve it for future use, they can export it as a PDF or any other supported format. All that, with just a couple of clicks.
The most important reports can be placed on the Web interface home page, for quick access. For example, you can do so with reports like Recently created users and Recently deleted users to monitor such accounts without any extra clicking required.
You can also present reports as charts, for a broad overview of your environment. For example, you can display charts with inactive user and computer accounts, enabled guest accounts, users whose password never expires, or any other directory health metric you can imagine. If something seems out of line when you look at one of these charts, you can always click on it to view the full report and go down the rabbit hole.
Finally, you can combine charts from multiple reports into overviews to get an environment-wide perspective in a single click. Adaxes offers a bunch of preconfigured overviews that you can use straight out of the box for risk analysis, group membership review, Exchange mailbox monitoring, etc. but you are not limited by what comes out of the box. Only by your imagination.
How to configure reports in the Web interface
Report customization
If your organization has some specific requirements that are not covered by the 200+ built-in reports, Adaxes still has your back. Each report can be extensively modified to perfectly fit your needs. You can adjust pretty much anything about the existing reports – add your own parameters, alter the report scope, modify the existing charts or add your own charts, change the default columns shown in the report, etc.
In addition to modifying existing reports, Adaxes allows you to create custom reports from scratch. One way you can do it is create reports based on directory search queries. These are your bread-and-butter reports that you can create in minutes and start using daily without much effort.
If you feel that search queries on their own are too limited, you can supplement them with conditions to refine the query results. For example, you can create a report on all enabled users from a certain department but exclude the accounts that are not licensed for Microsoft 365.
If this method still doesn't cut it, you can create reports using PowerShell scripts. Adaxes offers plenty of scripting shortcuts when it comes to gathering data from your directory, Exchange, and Microsoft 365. Much simpler than doing the same in vanilla PowerShell. And, you also get the benefit of being able to view the report in the Web interface.
Script-based reports even allow you to collect data beyond your directory. They can also include Adaxes log records, SQL database records, or, as a matter of fact, data from any sources. As long as you can access that data using PowerShell.
This external data can be seamlessly combined with the data from your directory and accessed on demand from the Web interface just like any other report. For example, you can create a report that combines details about certain AD users with the corresponding details from an external payroll system.
Report scheduling
If your users need to review certain reports on a regular basis, you can schedule them. All you need to do is define the schedule, the report to send, and the recipients. When the time comes, Adaxes will deliver the report either via email or by saving it to a file share of your choice.
For example, you can arrange that every Monday morning all group owners will get an email with the list of all the members of their groups so that they can spot any unexpected changes if there are any.
You can also allow users to schedule certain reports for themselves. For example, if a manager wants to receive a regular report with a full list of their subordinates, the self-scheduling option in the Web interface does exactly what they are looking for.
Access control
Finally, you might be wondering how do you even manage user access to all these reports, let alone ensure they do not see any objects they are not allowed to. Once again, Adaxes has your back.
To simplify access to reports, you can subdivide them into categories. Each employee role can then be granted access to a report category rather than a bunch of specific reports. For instance, users whose job title contains Auditor will only be able to see the reports for auditors. If you add a new report to this category, it will become available to your auditors automatically.
How to grant rights to view reports
Moreover, Adaxes will dynamically exclude objects from report results if a user who generated a report doesn't have the permissions to see those objects. This way, you can hide security-sensitive accounts that would fit report criteria while still giving ordinary users access to reports. Of course, when administrators generate the same report, they will see the full picture.
To sum it up, Adaxes provides practically limitless opportunities with its reporting platform, allowing you to get all the insights on your environment you would ever need. Better yet, the role-based access model lets you easily involve other employees in this affair with reports, boosting their awareness as well. Maybe it will eventually lead to those people helping you manage the directory, who knows? With Adaxes, everything is possible.
