# Auditing for Active Directory

The Active Directory auditing capability provides visibility into changes and activity occurring within your Active Directory environment. It captures directory changes, authentication activity, and object access events, enabling administrators to understand who performed an action, what changed, when it occurred, and where it originated.

Auditing is designed to help organizations investigate identity-related activity, reconstruct incidents, and respond quickly to unauthorized or suspicious changes.

Note

This feature is part of the Commvault Early Adopter program. The Commvault Early Adopter program was created to engage customer feedback on specific features. Commvault works with select customers to discuss, plan, and help deploy the feature release, and to proactively assist with any issues. If you are interested in becoming part of the Commvault Early Adopter program, please contact us at earlyadopter@commvault.com.

## What auditing does

The Active Directory auditing capability:

- Captures changes to Active Directory objects, including users, groups, computers, and Group Policy

- Tracks authentication and logon activity across domain controllers

- Provides comprehensive activity context, including:

  - What changed

  - Who performed the action

  - When it occurred

  - Where it originated

- Consolidates activity across domain controllers into a unified event view

- Provides a searchable and filterable event timeline for investigation

- Enables rollback of selected changes using captured change history

Audit events are displayed in the console, where administrators can filter, investigate, and take corrective action.

## When to use auditing

Use Active Directory Auditing to:

- Investigate changes to privileged groups such as Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins

- Track modifications to domain configuration, permissions, and Group Policy

- Reconstruct identity-related incidents and understand attacker behavior

- Monitor administrative activity and validate expected changes

- Quickly identify and reverse unauthorized or risky modifications

Auditing complements vulnerability assessments and recovery capabilities by providing visibility into ongoing activity, enabling faster detection, investigation, and response.

## What auditing does not do

The Active Directory Auditing capability is focused on visibility and investigation.

It does not:

- Prevent or block changes in Active Directory.

- Provide long-term log archival or compliance reporting. For more information, see data retention.

- Replace SIEM or centralized log management platforms.

- Perform automated remediation of detected activity.

Auditing provides the data needed to investigate and respond to activity, but all actions must be reviewed and executed by an administrator.

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