Welcome to Adaxes. In this video we'll be looking at reports. Being able to monitor, analyze and understand what's going on in your environment is very important in terms of security and it's one of the key aspects of ensuring that your company is audit ready and meets all the compliance requirements.
To achieve that, Adaxes provides more than 200 reports that can be useful to many different users from administrators who are responsible for the entire IT infrastructure, to users who just need to maintain a couple of groups in AD. Having such an extensive list of reports, I can easily answer questions like Do I have computers running outdated versions of Windows? Are there abandoned computer accounts?
Which groups are unmoderated in Exchange? What quotas, limits and restrictions are applied to mailboxes? Are there any security groups that are nested within other groups?
Are there groups without members? Who manages those groups? Are there unmanaged ones?
are all critical OUs protected from accidental deletion, and many others. And of course, there is a bunch of reports related to user accounts, their statuses, home folders, managers, subordinates, passwords, and things like that. Let's take a closer look at one of them, Inactive Users.
This report shows me all the users across all my AD domains that have been inactive for more than 90 days. And here I can see some disabled user accounts, which is probably fine. But who are all these users? Are these ex-employees who still retain access to the corporate network?
If that's the case, I can simply select all of them and deprovision all their accounts in one go. Or here I have another report called Logon Hours. It enables me to see who's allowed to log in any time and day of the week. Those whose logon hours are restricted. Users allowed to log in on weekends, during non-working hours.
The computers they're allowed to use, and other information of that kind. However... Reports can be helpful not just for the IT staff, but for other users as well, like managers, auditors, HR and others can make good use of them. For example, I can use the members of my Manage Groups report to see all the members of all the groups I'm an owner of in a single list, which gives me a convenient way to review the members of the groups I manage. I can then go ahead and export the report to a file, like PDF, CSV, Excel and others.
And now I can print this document, share it with someone else, or just keep it as a backup. If I want to review this report on a regular basis, here I have the option to schedule it for myself. In addition to the self-service option, when users choose themselves which reports they want to receive and when, the delivery of reports can also be scheduled in a centralized manner.
For example, you may want all managers to receive a report on membership in their groups every Monday at 8am. To do that, First I need to select the frequency with which to deliver the report, like daily, weekly or monthly. These three options are the built-in ones, and you can add your own if you need to. And now I can select the report I want to schedule. Let's select members of my managed groups.
Then I need to configure the parameters of the report, choose the document type, like PDF, and customize various document options. And then I need to determine how I want the report to be delivered to users. It can be delivered to a file share, like directly to the user's home folder, or via email. And here I can also customize the email message that will be sent to users. And finally, I need to specify who will receive the report.
Let's select members of the Managers Group. And here we go. Now all members of the Managers Group will receive the Members of my Managed Groups report every Monday morning. To be able to view a report in Adaxes, users must have appropriate permissions.
and you can granularly control which users should have access to which reports. For example, now I'm logged in as an admin, and as you can see, all reports are available to me without any restrictions. However, when a manager logs in, they would see only a specific set of reports that they have the permission to view. And in addition to that, if a user isn't allowed to see certain objects in AD, like if a manager isn't allowed to see disabled user accounts, they also won't show up in any of the reports. Who can see which report is controlled by assigning permissions to security roles in Adaxes?
For example, here I have a role for Managers. As you can see, this role allows users to view the reports that belong to the category called For Managers. What this means is that to control which reports are available to Managers, I need to explicitly add or remove them from this particular category. To provide users with quick access to the most important and frequently used reports, you can put them right on the home page of the web interface. As you can see here, some reports can be presented in the form of charts.
Like here, I can see all the user account statuses, security and distribution groups, all the different computer types, the number of inactive users allowed to log in, the password expiration report and others. All the essential information is available at a glance, and if I want to, I can go deeper to see all the details I need. Some of the reports can be presented in expanded form on the homepage, like these two, Recently Created Objects and Recently Deleted Objects. It enables me to see what objects have been created and deleted in my environment every time I open the web interface.
And if I notice that someone has deleted an important object, like this security group, I can open the report, and restore it straight away with just a couple of clicks. To get the big picture of what's going on in your environment, you can use another neat feature in Adaxes called Report Overviews. For example, here I have an overview addressing different cleanup activities, like the number of inactive users and computers, empty groups, organizational units.
If I go to Risk Analysis, I'll see things like the number of enabled guest accounts, users allowed to have weak passwords, Things like reversible passwords and passwords that never expire. Here I have an overview related to user accounts, logon options, password policies, managers, object owners. All the different things on groups, membership details.
All these overviews come built in with Adaxes. And if you need to, you can customize them the way you want or even create your own. In addition to that, you can customize every single report provided by Adaxes.
and adjust pretty much everything about them to fit the exact needs of your organization. Let's take a look at what exactly I can customize. Here I can configure scope options that determine what objects are included in the report.
For example, I may want a report to contain only members of specific groups, or objects managed by specific users. Here I can add different parameters to the report, like checkboxes, text fields, drop-down lists, which can be used to supply additional information necessary to generate the report. I can also change which columns are visible by default, how objects are sorted and grouped, create my own custom columns with my data. Here I can modify report generation options, like the search filter, add various conditions for including or excluding objects. And also I have an option to add a chart to the report to create a visual representation of the data.
In addition to the extensive list of pre-canned reports, you can also create your own custom ones that can be specific to the needs of your organization. For example, here I have two reports I've created myself. This one shows all the users from a specific department that don't have any licenses in Office 365. This report is generated by performing a simple query in Active Directory, plus a condition that is used to exclude users that have licenses assigned. The second report is a little bit more complex. and it is generated using a PowerShell script.
Using scripts enables you to go beyond just the objects stored in Active Directory and also include things like log records, approval requests, custom objects. For instance, these items could be records from your database, permissions, file shares, or anything you want. So, the reporting feature in Adaxes provides an easy-to-use way to monitor and analyze what's going on in your environment and comply with different audit requirements. And with the customization options and the ability to create your own reports, it gives you practically limitless capabilities.
Thanks for watching.