How to track Active Directory user login history and audit logins
Learn how to audit Active Directory user login history effectively with UserLock. Get centralized, real-time reports on all successful and failed login attempts.
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Tracking and auditing Active Directory user login history is crucial for maintaining security and compliance. This guide will show you how to collect, manage, and analyze login events effectively, ensuring you can quickly identify nad respond to potential threats.
The importance of tracking login history
Logons are the one common activity across nearly all attack patterns.
That makes the logon one of the clearest indicators of compromise. Monitoring your logins is one of the most effective ways to protect company data and thwart attacks.
The need to provide a centralized and searchable audit on all active directory user login history is also mandatory across major security standards, compliance requirements, and governance policies.
Step-by-step guide to enable auditing on every session access event
When it comes to a full history of all domain user login behavior, you need quick access to real-time data.
UserLock collects a wide range of event parameters for each domain account. You can add each of these parameters to reports and filter to generate your own report.
Here's a step-by-step guide on setting up Active Directory user login history audits and reports:
Open the UserLock console
Define audit settings
Apply UserLock policies
Enable alerts and notifications
Access real-time monitoring and reporting
Verify configuration
Read a step-by-step guide to user login auditing in UserLock vs. native Windows event viewer.
How UserLock supports advanced user login auditing
With UserLock, you get a real-time audit of user access events across all devices and session types. You get the advantages of a comprehensive and centralized audit, but without the need to sift through a tsunami of event logs.
Features and benefits
UserLock's searchable dashboard gives you:
Real-time visibility on access events on all machines and devices, across all different session types (Interactive, Wi-Fi, VPN, IIS, and SaaS), for a central audit across the network.
Powerful filtering and search capabilities so you can quickly focus on the information you need.
Scalability, since it works the same whether you have 100 or 100,000 users.
Tamper-proof logs, since UserLock audits and reports on all administrator activity. This reduces the risk of insider threats, and makes sure external attackers can't erase their tracks by wiping logs in native Active Directory.
What’s more, UserLock can set-up multi-factor authentication for all Active Directory user logins. Compatible with authenticator applications, the UserLock Push notification app, and hardware keys such as YubiKey or Token2, UserLock further protects every login to the network across the entire organization.
Setup and configure user access reports in UserLock
Common report filters include time parameters, which make reports easy to read. You can also filter the logs by users, group, or OU. users. You can also report on an archived database by changing the database target source.
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You can also schedule a full report history of all login connections for a user and/or for a machine. You can send the report directly to your email, or to anyone else who needs to access or record it. This is especially useful if you need to regularly review a report, for example, the session history of the past week.
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Example Active Directory user login history reports
All Active Directory user sessions report
Audit and report on each user logon and logon attempt.
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Concurrent session report
Report on all domain users with simultaneous sessions opened within a given day.
IIS session history report
Report on all session history to Microsoft IIS Servers (E.g. web apps such as Outlook Web Access).
Denied logon report
Report on all access attempts rejected by Active Directory. This includes multiple logon failure attempts.
Administrator actions report
UserLock helps prevent insider threats and stop external attackers from moving across your network. The full history of all system and admin user logins helps protects both the organization and the admin. For example, if ever there were an incident, the admin could easily demonstrate that it was not him or her that used the admin account or service account to access data or system.
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Support forensics and improve compliance with UserLock
With UserLock, you can maintain a centralized audit on all network login events, generate detailed reports to track security threats, and ensure regulatory compliance.
But UserLock does not stop at auditing. The login is the most compelling point at which to both monitor as well as stop potentially inappropriate access from ever happening.
Through real-time monitoring and access alerts, you can add another layer to your security strategy: threat detection.
UserLock’s multi-layered security goes beyond auditing and threat detection, with a focus on access controls. UserLock's multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Active Directory and contextual logon restrictions allow IT admins to set access policies according to:
Role: Set access policies by Active Directory user, group, or OU for strong role-based access controls and seamless change management.
Origin: Limit access by workstation, device, IP range, department, or country.
Time: Limit access to working hours, set time quotas, and define maximum session times and idle session time.
Session type: Control workstation, terminal, Wi-FI, VPN, IIS, and SaaS sessions to protect both interactive sessions and network access for remote and mobile users.
Simultaneous connections: Limit the number of initial access points and prevent concurrent sessions from a single user identity.
Prevent innappropriate use of credentials, and shift from a reactive to a preventative security model with UserLock.
