In modern cybersecurity environments, maintaining clear, continuous visibility into Active Directory (AD) is critical. AD state reporting plays a vital role by providing real-time insight into users, accounts, permissions, and object health—allowing security teams to identify issues such as stale accounts, excessive privileges, or configuration drift before they can be exploited.
By continuously monitoring how users, computers, groups, and replication are configured, Active Directory state reporting enables a more proactive approach to threat detection and risk mitigation. Instead of reacting to incidents after the fact, security teams can spot weaknesses early, reduce attack paths, and maintain a stronger overall AD security posture.
In this blog, we explore how Lepide simplifies Active Directory state reporting—from analyzing user and computer status to tracking permissions and replication health—and how these insights help security teams maintain control, reduce risk, and strengthen AD hygiene.
What are Active Directory State Reports?
Active Directory (AD) state reports illustrate various aspects of an AD environment such as its health, security, and compliance, together with the present condition (state) of users, groups, computers, permissions, and configurations.
These reports enable administrators to complete different tasks like managing identities, auditing access, and securing the environment by, for example, identifying stale accounts, expired passwords, replication issues, or unauthorized access.
In addition to identifying inactive accounts and helping with regulatory compliance, these reports are all about who has what access.
Key Active Directory State Reports From Lepide
Lepide offers extensive Active Directory state reports that includes point-in-time snapshots, and detailed analytics for security management even before any breaches. Below are the list of AD state reports from Lepide:
- User and Account Status: These reports provide insight and show the reports related to the state of all users in a domain either enabled or disabled. It shows the status and locations of all users as per the selected backup snapshot, the group memberships of the users, all users with the administrative privileges, the users whose passwords will never expire.
- Computer Reports: This category includes the reports related to the state of all security and distribution groups in a domain. It shows all available computers as per the selected snapshot, and all available service principal names within the domain.
- Permission and Access Reports: These reports are detailed audits that provide a comprehensive overview of the access rights and privileges assigned to users and groups within the AD environment. This report displays user/group membership direct or indirect, effective permissions on OUs/ Resources, and access routes through nested groups.
- Security Reports: The security reports are documents and real-time analyses of detailed audits that provide a comprehensive overview of the access rights and privileges assigned to users and groups within the AD environment. The security reports point out the security of the domain, its Active Directory environment, and objects with Permission reports, Audit reports, and Owner reports.
- Replication Reports: These reports show all the created, deleted replications and all operations of replications such as create, delete, and rename. These reports are essential for monitoring the health of the AD environment and troubleshooting failures.
- Change Auditing Reporting: The AD change audit report can be used to track all changes related to users, groups, GPO’s, OUs, etc., and includes timestamps, performer names, before and after images, as well as explanations and filtering options that provide forensic evidence of changes made in real time by item (e.g. Admin changes during last quarter) and for each specific path or period of time.
- Deleted Object Reports: In the context of Active Directory (AD), “Delete object reports” are Administration/Audit reports that capture which objects (such as user account, and computer accounts) have been deleted from a system. The report will search the Deleted Objects container for the machines or users that were present throughout the retention period and the time of deletion, and what can be recovered will be displayed individually.
Why Active Directory State Reporting is Important?
In order to establish an effective cybersecurity posture and comply with regulation while improving efficiency and providing an avenue to resolve problems in the Active Directory environment, utilizing AD state reports from Lepide is essential.
- Security Benefits: From a security perspective, these reports allow for the identification of vulnerabilities before they are exploited. Identified vulnerabilities can include stale accounts susceptible to takeover by attackers, excessive permissions that allow for privilege escalation and lateral movement, and non-expiring passwords associated with dormant users/ computers/ over-privileged accounts.
By utilizing these reports, attackers will have a much smaller window of opportunity to exploit overlooked vulnerabilities in AD, in line with the principle of Zero Trust. Review of these reports regularly will reduce the likelihood of AD breach through the exploitation of overlooked weaknesses.
- Compliance: Lepide reports satisfy compliance standards by producing audit-ready proof of access controls, effective permissions, and change histories. Continuous logs make it easier to establish compliance during assessments by demonstrating who accessed what resources and when changes were made.
Access reviews and segregation-of-duties certification are automated. When it comes to ensuring compliance and conducting incident investigations, the audit trails offer proof of who accessed what, when, and from where.
- Efficient Management and Operations: The reports reduce clutter and risks by providing administrators with a clear view of users, groups, OUs, and domain controllers. They also automate the discovery of stale or orphaned accounts and groups. PowerShell scripting and LDAP dives are eliminated by the dashboards, which offer unified, straightforward views of all AD objects.
Efficient cleanup, policy enforcement, and regular hygiene duties are made possible by the pre-built configurable reports with filters and exports. This relieves administrators of tedious tasks so they can concentrate on strategic security making operations work efficiently.
- Troubleshooting Efficiency: By giving the visibility and information required to promptly detect, diagnose, and fix problems before they result in major downtime or security breaches, these reports are essential for improving troubleshooting efficiency. Replication failures, authentication problems from locked or stale accounts, and change-induced outages are all promptly identified by the reports.
Detailed or consolidated reports and logs provide a clear picture of “who did what, when, and where” when an issue does arise. Administrators can use linked data to identify the precise reason, thus cutting down on the time spent on inquiry and forensic analysis, rather than manually sorting through thousands of urgent event logs from many systems.
Conclusion
Lepide Auditor for Active Directory makes it easier for IT teams to maintain a strong security and compliance posture by turning Active Directory state reporting from a laborious, manual task into a streamlined, simple process.
From user status and permission analysis to replication health and deleted item tracking, Lepide’s extensive array of AD state reports provides real-time snapshots and historical insights customized for practical applications.
By doing away with guesswork, Lepide facilitates quick vulnerability detection and proactive management. Businesses benefit from improved security against threats like privilege escalation or stale accounts, easy compliance standards, streamlined everyday operations, and quick troubleshooting of AD problems. Lepide allows administrators to prioritize strategy over spreadsheets, resulting in a long-term healthier AD environment.
Ready to enhance your Active Directory monitoring? Experience clear, actionable state insights by starting a free trial or scheduling a demo with one of our engineers.
