Top 20 Best FREE Active Directory Reporting Tools (AD Tools)
Best Free Active Directory Reporting Tools (AD Tools). Active Directory is one of the most commonly used services by network administration-related professionals. Despite the high usability of Microsoft Active Directory, the user and the administration journey can be a bit harder with the unavailability of the inbuilt tools to perform complex or frequent tasks. On the other hand, the original user interface has less performance, is a bit stubborn to use, and does not support automation properly.
This issue is no longer a blocker for you since we will now introduce some interesting Active Directory Reporting Tools that can be used to enhance the performance and usability of your administration journey.
Active Directory Tools
This list covers the following types of Active Directory Tools:
- Active Directory Reporting Tools
- Active Directory Management tools
- Active Directory Health Check Tools
- Active Directory Audit Tools
- Active Directory Automation
- Active Directory compliance
Top 20 Best Free Active Directory Reporting Tools / Software
1. InfraSOS- Active Directory Reporting Tools / Office 365 Reports / AD Health
InfraSOS is an Active Directory Reporting SaaS tool, also run reports on Azure AD, Office 365 reports, Exchange and Active Directory health check tool (replication, domain controller, dns health). You can also perform automation and workflow against your Active Directory. Great for IT administrators or helpdesk staff who need to perform operations against your AD (Adding, deleting Users. Adding Office365 license to users and more..) It has over 200 AD reports to run against Active Directory. Great auditing tool.
2. SolarWinds NTFS Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory
Solarwinds Permissions Analyzer addresses the poor permissions management issue in original Active Directory programs. It provides the details of the active directory NTFS file share permissions of the system users such as, who the users are, what access privileges they have and don’t have. With this tool, you can identify user’s permissions that are inherited, and find permissions of groups and individual users. This tool is an intuitive tool that suits all types of Active Directory environments.
3. ManageEngine ADManager Plus
ADManager Plus helps IT administrators and technicians to manage AD objects, groups, and users with a centralized GUI and provides options to generate instant reports more conveniently and also Office 365 reporting. This tool comes in handy not only in AD management but also in bulk user management, real last logon reports, and computer management. They offer a free 30 day trial and is all web based. Run reports on AD, Azure AD, Office365 and Exchange Server.
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4. CjWDev AD Tidy
AD Tidy by CJWDev helps to track down the users or computer accounts in your active directory domain, which are no longer in use, based on details such as DNS record timestamp and last logon time, etc. Further, this helps in performing several actions on the accounts found, such as Disable accounts, Delete, Move To Another Organizational unit, Set Description, Set Expiration Date, Add, Remove From Group/Groups and Hide From Exchange Address Lists, etc.
5. Specops Software Gpupdate
SpecOps GPUPDATE gives the administrative opportunity to control single or multiple computers remotely from the Active Directory. There are few other options available such as Refreshing Group Policy and confirming Updates via WSUS, Wake-Up Computer with Wake-On Lan, and Shutdown/Restart the devices Remotely.
6. Specops Active Directory Password Auditor
Specops Password Auditor helps you to analyze your Active Directory domain password policies, identify accounts with password vulnerabilities, for example users with expired passwords, identical passwords, weak passwords and even password data breaches against a list of vulnerable passwords obtained from multiple data breach leaks.
Password Auditor generates comparison reports of the password settings in your organization, with industry standards and compliance standards from NIST, PCI, Microsoft, and SANS.
7. CjWDev AD Photo Edit
AD Photo Edit is used to upload images to the Active Directory where Outlook 2010 pulls profile pictures. One issue that Outlook 2010, SharePoint, and Lync have is that they lack a method of uploading display pictures for the thumbnailPhoto attribute in Active Directory. This tool is highly user-friendly where it’s very convenient to upload, change or export these display images.
8. CjWDev AD Info
AD Info is another Active Directory management tool that has over 190 built-in reports. As part of those, this tool allows you to create customized reports. Most importantly, this tool has a user-friendly UI. . Querying within the Active Directory domain is now much easier with this tool as it supports custom querying according to your requirement. This saves your time as you are querying only the data that you want. The data you retrieved can be exported as a CSV file for further references and use. Another benefit of this tool is that it is Multi-Domain Friendly as you can query any domain network where you have access.
9. SysOpsTools AD Query
AD Query is another free tool used for Active Directory reporting. You can use AD Query to query users and devices in an individual domain. Viewing data is more clean and clear with this tool as object Schemas & Lightweight Directory Access Protocol data can be viewed in one simple window. Moreover, binary schema data are expressed in a human-readable format. The retrieved data can be expired as an XML file. AD Query is very easy to install and use. This tool is a total time saver for network administrators
10. Quest Recovery Manager
Quest Recovery Manager acts as an insurance plan for the Active Directory. This tool helps you to backup the AD at the object level and also helps to capture the changes and issues of the AD network at a very early stage. The knowledge and the observation captured with this tool can further be used in forecasting object-level issues and applying fixes for them.
Quest Recovery Manager reduces the downtime as it can restore objects in Active Directories without restarting cloud domain controllers and keep the connection with the affected entities to restate it quickly.
11. SysAdmin & SysAdmin Anywhere
SysAdmin is an administration tool for multidomain networks of Active Directories. You can use this tool to manage the domains, users, and devices connected to the network. SysAdmin gives you the flexibility in performing a large number of tasks including Add, edit and deletes objects, managing Events, and processes, resetting passwords, and adding images You can also use this tool to Restart, and shutdown remote devices. SysAdmin allowing you to remotely access the computers Anywhere without router setup is a significant advantage.
12. Managed Service Accounts GUI
Managed Service Accounts GUI by CJWDEV can be used to install, create, configure, remove and assign managed service accounts and the group managed service accounts. This tool is created to work with managed service accounts easily eliminating using the bulk of Powershell scripts. MSA has a highly user-friendly graphical user interface which makes the management convenient and efficient.
13. Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer
Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is a tool that provides graphical visualization to ordinary Active Directories. This tool provides automated creation of a Microsoft Visio diagram of a specific Active Directory topology. These diagrams include a bunch of entities such as administrative groups, sites, domains, organizational units, and servers. With this tool, you have inspected your network from another perspective. This tool further allows you to have a specific view of a particular device and how it is linked together with other entities, before taking crucial decisions. You can customize these diagrams as per your requirement using Microsoft Office Visio.
14. ManageEngine Active Directory Tools
ManageEngine Active Directory Tools help you to manage Active Directory with integrated features such as CSV Generator, AD Replication Manager, AD Query Tool, SharePoint Manager, Last Logon Reporter, Terminal Session Manager, DMZ Port Analyzer, Domain and DC Roles Reported, Local Users Manager, Password Policy Manager, SharePoint Manager, and Exchange Health Monitor.
These tools are focused on providing efficient management of Active Directories by providing reminders and notifications over the action items such as password reset and expiry notification etc. With Terminal Session Manager, you can use PowerShell query and manage multiple terminal sessions from a centralized device. This is very useful as it takes away a bunch of repetitive actions, hence saving time.
15. Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner
IT Environment Health Scanner helps you maintain consistency in Active Directory. You can collect information on site DNS configuration details, subnet configurations, health, and configuration of network adapters of all domain controllers. Thus you can scan the Active Directory service to capture the above details and pinpoint major issues and the reasons for them. This tool is very easy to use. Hence, it is a convenient tool for beginners in network administration, but experienced users may see this as a limited software tool.
16. Group Manager
Group manager by CjWDEV is a user-friendly tool that facilitates end-users in managing group membership for user groups. This tool is an easy-to-use tool designed for end-users to perform add and remove actions on network users and groups. There is no configuration required since it automatically detects current users and identifies the groups that have administrative authority. This tool allows you to add members from other domains too. Further, you can control which types of entities can be added to the groups and more. Exporting details of group members to CSV files is also possible with the Group manager tool.
17. Softerra Browser for LDAP
Softerra Browser for LDAP is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol browser that supports Read-Only activities on LDAP infrastructures. This tool allows you to Browse, Search View, and Export information from a particular LDAP. To have a completely functioning LDAP reporting and directory management, a Softerra LDAP Administrator is also needed.
18. Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner
Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner is a Free software tool. When an account is locked out of Active Directory, this tool alerts network administrators and allows them to unlock the account via the GUI or with mobile devices quickly. Lockout examiner minimizes the troubleshooting time as it is very easy to identify root causes of lockouts with automated services. This tool is highly beneficial to the business as it the pressure on the service desks and also helps to retain the user experience too.
19. Netwrix InactXive User Tracker
Netwrix Inactive User Tracker is used to identify Active Directory accounts that are not in use and provides details such as how long the accounts have been in stale mode etc. and helps to determine the required actions. This tool is capable of automatically updating the state of the connected accounts without any manual inspection.
This tool gives the capability of deactivating accounts if, in any chance, that account has been inactive for a substantially long time. This process is really important as you can reduce the risk of a malicious attack on your data. Following up these processes will be a plus point when you are being audited as it reflects that you are taking a proactive approach towards secured record management.
20. Lepide Last Login Report
Lepide Last Login Report allows you to view information such as a description of the last login details of users of the Active Directory in terms of login names, common names, and usernames, etc. You can also query over the data to find out specific fields easily, and generate CSV / HTML files for further analysis. The report generation is much easier as all you have to do is to enter the domain name or the IP of the Domain Controller along with the user’s login credentials. It will quickly generate the report without much hassle,
Best FREE Active Directory Reporting Tools Conclusion
Active Directory Tools are popular services nowadays which needs to have a comprehensive flow in operation third-party tools can improve the efficiency and quality of service of Active Directory providing more control over your system. Not only the Active Directory tools mentioned here but there are many other AD reporting tools available for active directory reporting and management where you can pick the essentials to cope with the requirements. Combining necessary tools to cater to specific tasks will help you to redefine the Active directory services with more arrangement, consistency, and Active Directory security.
