Welcome to Adaxes. In this video we’ll be looking at logging,
which is important when it comes to tracking the activities that take place in your environment,
and it can be especially useful if you delegate various tasks to users, like creating user
accounts, managing group memberships, resetting passwords and so on. All the operations that are performed in Active
Directory, Exchange and Office 365 using Adaxes are logged, which allows me to see exactly
who did what and when, if I need to. For example, if I notice that a user called
John Smith was added to the Administrators group, I can easily find this operation in
the logs. To do that, I can use a filter to display
only additions to, or removals from users in groups, and among those operations I can
then select only the adding of members to the ‘Administrators’ group, and now I
can see the operation I’m looking for. Having found it, I can then drill down and
see all the details about it, like who added John Smith to the group, which host the operation came from, when exactly it happened, and so on, all in a human-readable format that’s
easy to understand. Or, another situation which a lot of us have
found ourselves in, is when somebody deleted something important, like, for example, an
Organizational Unit. Using logs, I can also easily and quickly
find out who did that, so I can come back to this user later, and the cool thing is
that I can restore the deleted OU direct from the Activity Log view and put it back where
it belongs. If I want to see all the operations that were
performed only on a specific object, like for example, this group, I can do that with
the help of the Management History view. Here I can see when and by whom the group
was created, who added new members to it and who removed them, who updated the group’s
description, and when, and so on. And if I want to see all the operations performed
by a specific user, like the one that recently added a lot of members to the group, I can
do that with the help of the Management Activity view. Here I can see absolutely everything that
this user has done; but, for example, if I only want to see which members this user added
or removed from groups, I can filter out all the other operations, and then I can also
group the log records according to AD groups, so I can see at a glance which members were
added or removed from the ‘Administrators’ group, which users were added to the ‘Managers’
one and so on, which is really convenient. Also, if certain operations are executed automatically by Adaxes, they can be seen in the logs as well. For example, here I can see that a Scheduled
Task automatically imported a new user account from a CSV file. And if I look at the details of it, I can
also see all the other operations that were automatically executed as a result of it,
like adding the new user to groups, moving the account, creating an Exchange mailbox
and other onboarding procedures. If you need to have more flexibility and view
only the logs that meet certain criteria, Adaxes allows you to do that with the help
of Reports. For example, here I have a report that shows
the errors in the Adaxes logs for a certain period, which can come in handy for administrators,
allowing them to easily monitor events like this. Or, for example, managers can use the Management
Activity report provided in Adaxes to see all the operations that were executed by their subordinates, so they can track what they’re doing. And if I need to see this report on a regular
basis, I can schedule it, so, instead of generating it by hand, I can, for example, get it to
be automatically delivered to me every day by email as a PDF file. In addition to the built-in reports, I can
also create my own custom ones. For example, here I have a report that I configured
myself which shows all the operations performed by non-administrators outside the working
hours of my organization. If you want to go even further, it is also
possible to access Adaxes logs programmatically, like for example, with the help of PowerShell
scripts, which allow log records to be retrieved, based on certain criteria, which I can make
almost as complex as I want. If you have a centralized log collection system
that supports the Syslog protocol, you can easily integrate Adaxes with it, to enable
you to view Adaxes log records alongside all the other logs collected from your environment. By default, Adaxes stores all its logs in
a built-in local database, so it works perfectly without any additional software in deployments
with only one Adaxes service. However, Adaxes also supports multi-server
deployment scenarios. For example, you can have multiple Adaxes
services in different locations to achieve load balancing and fault tolerance. For such cases, we recommend using an external
Microsoft SQL Server database, and configuring Adaxes to store all the logs from all the
Adaxes services in it. Such a database can be hosted either locally
or, for example, in the Azure cloud, and Adaxes supports all the database replication scenarios
available in MS SQL Server. So, the logging feature that Adaxes provides,
gives you a very valuable ability to track user activities as well as operations that
are automatically executed by various automation rules, scheduled tasks and so on. Adaxes also makes it really easy to navigate
the log records and quickly and easily find the specific operations you’re interested
in and gives you a complete breakdown of them which you can then analyze as needed. Thanks for watching.
