Knowing the state and the health of your directory is important.  Effective directory analytics can be the difference between a smoothly running enterprise and a security or infrastructure mishap.  Monitoring your environment both on demand and in real time are both important.  One person’s mundane information may be another’s critical data.  Therefore, flexibility as to which data fits in what category is important.

Information on Demand

Things to be monitored on demand usually include infrastructure that doesn’t change as much once set up (things like your forest, domain controllers, and directory infrastructure) .  Here we aren’t talking about whether your servers are up or not, but rather their configuration.  (Like does my forest have the Recycle Bin enabled?  How many domain controllers are there and how are they configured?)  Monitoring on demand means that you can access easy to read and access (but secure) visually pleasing reports when you want them.

Push Information to you in Real Time

If something is critical, it’s better if this information is pushed to you without asking.  You may want an email and/or SMS if your domain administrators group changes at all, for example.  To support this, you need an engine that can run jobs with different frequencies to monitor your environment and send you the information that you need in real-time in response to anomalies.

PeopleAudit

Web Active Directory’s PeoplePlatform provides both an analytics and a workflow engine called PeopleFlow.  Together, these make PeopleAudit.  Construct the specific reports you need (with graphs) without scripting, coding, or using Excel.  Run these web-based reports when you want and export the data where you want.  Control who can see or run different reports with configurable role-based security.  The workflow engine provides the ability for hundreds of agents to work for you each running at varying frequencies.  These agents can examine at all aspects of your environment ready to send you critical information in real-time when something happens in your directory that needs attention.  Agents can also act silently on your behalf in real-time to make adjustments.  This can include directory maintenance– for example moving disabled users into a special OU.