Free active directory tools

This program leaves next to no room for error and allows you to track permission changes easily over time. The only problem is that you have to contact the company directly in order to view a quote. That being said you can download a free trial. There are many occasions in Active Directory where a user is locked out of Active Directory at the most inconvenient time. Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner has been designed for the expressed purpose of getting to the bottom of Active Directory lockouts.

This tool notifies administrators when an account has been locked out of Active Directory so that they can take a closer look at why this is the case. You can use Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner to ascertain why the user has been locked out with relative ease.

Once an administrator has seen that an account has been locked out they can unlock that account through the centralized console or a mobile device. This enables the user to get user accounts unlocked ASAP. As a consequence, normal service can be resumed much quicker than it would be trying to go it alone with Active Directory.

Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner is a tool that provides a solid account monitoring experience. In the event that a user gets locked out this tool is invaluable at getting the account unlocked so that they can get back to business quickly. This product can be downloaded for free.

Bulk Password Control is a tool designed to help users with password management on Active Directory. As a password manager, Bulk Password Control is very fast paced. You can change passwords on multiple accounts at once. You can do this through the use of a password generator that creates passwords for each account. In the event that you want to make this more simple, you can set every account password to the same code.

In other words, you can manage passwords in bulk. This gives you a high degree of control over your active directory users and computers so that if you need to restructure or remove an unsuitable account you can do so with ease.

The bulk password management ability of this product makes it ideal for larger enterprise environments with lots of different users and accounts. Bulk Password Control can be downloaded for free. This tool scans for inactive user accounts and then provides you with information on for how long the accounts have been dormant.

In effect, the tool automatically keeps you updated on the state of your connected accounts so that you can take action if need be. Once you can see that an account has been inactive for a substantial length of time you can deactivate it.

Deactivating inactive accounts will reduce the risk of a malicious entity gaining access to your data. Likewise, it will also help if you are audited because it shows that you are taking a proactive approach towards cybersecurity and record management.

Netwrix Inactive User Tracker is a tool that is worth its weight in gold for those moments where you need to clean up your Active Directory accounts.

Netwrix Inactive User Tracker can be downloaded for free. Finally, we have Lepide Last Login Report. Lepide Last Login Report is a tool that allows you to view information on when users last logged into Active Directory. You can view login times in bulk alongside usernames and common names. You can simply click report to start generating the document.

Lepide Last Login Report is a tool you should definitely consider if you require a tool to monitor access to Active Directory. You can download this tool for free. By incorporating third-party tools to your administrative toolkit you can greatly improve your experience of Active Directory and start to manage your data more effectively.

SolarWinds Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory allows you to provide a little more scrutiny over who has access to what data. On the health maintenance side of things, Recovery Manager for Active Directory acts as a backup plan if something goes wrong.

It goes without saying that Bulk Password Control allows you to allocate and manage user passwords on an automated basis. Combining these tools together, or similar tools provide you with a strong cross-section of tools to redefine your Active Directory experience.

See also: PowerShell Cheat Sheet. Your user accounts and resource permissions data is flowed through to Active Directory. However, ARM is able to coordinate data between several instances of AD and record all of the information necessary to quickly compile compliance reports. Microsoft also makes Active Directory available as an Azure service.

The price for AD is free for users of Azure services or Office This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Comparitech uses cookies. More info.

Menu Close. We are reader supported and may receive a commission when you make purchases using the links on our site. Learn about the best Microsoft Active Directory tools and management software on the market that take your experience from passable to excellent.

Tim Keary Network administration expert. Download free tool. Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer A great mapping tool to let you see your permissions hierarchy at a glance.

BeyondTrust Privilege Explorer A simple interface that clarifies the user permissions and device access rights held in Active Directory. Netwrix Account Lockout Examiner This tool supports the investigations into why a user has suddenly lost access permissions. Lepide Last Login Report This tool gives activity reports that enable you to spot abandoned accounts. What should you look for in Active Directory tools? We reviewed the market for AD management software and analyzed the options based on the following criteria: A facility to analyze the permissions structure A system to automate user account and group creation An audit trail that logs all changes to AD entries An assessment feature that helps to tighten security An abandoned account identifier A free trial period or a money-back guarantee to aid risk-free assessment A value for money package that is worth paying for or a free tool that is worth installing.

Cons: While the tool is easy to use, it features an advanced tab that contains a lot of options that can take time to fully explore. Cjwdev has a modular approach to Active Directory management. There are actually several tools for AD available form this developer. There is also a utility, called AD Photo Edit , which inserts images into AD records, so you can associate a picture of a user with each account. The Group Manager helps you manage the allocation of members to groups in Active Directory.

AD Account Reset Tool enables users or administrators to reset passwords. The AD Permissions Reporter is a great little tool for querying the permissions available on objects in your Active Directory domain. Specifically, this reporter will list the permissions granted on documents within your system. The paid version is available in a command line version to enable searches of the object permissions to be integrated into scripts. Specops specializes in password verification and fortification tools.

This utility strengthens security by helping you to design a password policy, which includes requirements to renew passwords and the enforcement of password compositions that are harder to guess or crack. The utility operates on Active Directory entries. The tool will search through your domain controllers, identifying accounts with weak passwords. The tool will also identify inactive user accounts. The results of this scan are a series of reports, which will identify accounts that represent security weaknesses.

However, this tool is quick and easy to follow so it will prove an essential utility for your system security. Recovery Manager for Active Directory is a comprehensive backup system to protect your authentication system. This tool will run on Windows Server versions from and Windows Vista and later. The recovery manager will back up your Active Directory databases and restore them. The location of the backup can be anywhere that is contactable over the network, including on the Cloud.

You can also backup Azure Active Directory. So, you can have either or both your AD server and your backup server on premises or in the Cloud. Backup transfers can be scheduled for quiet hours. This is a paid tool, but you can get a day free trial. There is also a version of Recovery Manager for Active Directory that specializes in global implementations.

BeyondTrust produces a large number of system security monitoring tools including several for managing Active Directory and others for monitoring system access through reading and manipulating Active Directory. Of these tools, you should particularly look at PowerBroker Auditor if you are following data security standards and need to demonstrate compliance. The tool keeps an eye on your AD domain controllers and raises an alert when any changes are made. This is a real-time monitoring system, but it also logs every change, so administrators can still get information of unauthorized AD changes if they happen to be out of the office.

The before and after status of each changed line is also recorded. This information enables you to rollback unexpected changes in your AD databases.

The controllers can be anywhere, just as long as they are reachable over a network or the internet. You can get a free trial of the PowerBroker Auditor and a free trial of PowerBroker Recovery is also available through the same link.

This tool is an alternative interface to the AD database that substitutes for the Active Directory native front-end. The permissions displayed by the tool include access rights for users and permissions on files held on the network. The Privilege Explorer is also a logging tool. It records: all access by all users and all the times that each file is opened or changed, and which user performed that action.

The PowerBroker Privilege Explorer integrates with the PowerBroker Auditor to improve record keeping and reporting and enables you to get a comprehensive overview of the permissions structure that has been implemented at your company. This security utility tracks changes in Active Directory to see whether unauthorized access has occurred and to rollback unexpected changes in the authentication hierarchy. This is a great defense against hackers who often adjust permissions on a system in order to give the stolen account that they are using more access rights.

PowerBroker Privilege Explorer is a paid product, but you can get a free trial to run it through its paces. Microsoft produces its own tools that augment the functionality of Active Directory. Of those, The Topology Diagrammer is probably the most impressive. This tool produces visualizations of the contents of your Active Directory permissions hierarchy. The tool gives you a choice over exactly which category of AD data gets mapped.

You can view data from the perspective of a domain, an organizational unit, a server, or a group. You need to have Microsoft Visio installed in order to use the Topology Diagrammer. Netwrix Auditor is not specifically tailored to Active Directory. However, it does include functions that manage Active Directory entries. The tool is a system-wide auditing utility that will help you protect your network and servers from intrusion and accidental damage.

The tool will log activities relating to user activities using the AD records in your domain controllers and it will also log all access to the authentication database. You can back up Active Directory data through the tool, controlling any changes that occur and restoring records individually or en masse if your AD system gets damaged or compromised by intruders.

This is a paid tool, but you can check it out on a day free trial. The software installs on all versions of Windows Server and it is also available as a virtual appliance to run over Hyper-V and VMWare.

Active Directory Explorer is a front-end to Active Directory domain controllers that has the look and feel of the standard Windows File Explorer utility. There's a lot to AD, though, and a large amount of time can quickly be eaten up having to fight with setting up permissions, adjusting small settings or making other small configurations that could be performed much easier, and faster, using a tool to streamline the process.

Naturally there are a huge range of tools available that offer a similarly huge range of functionality as far as AD management and AD monitoring goes. Some of them perform simple tasks such as adding or removing users, groups, or OUs, changing accounts available on a computer, puling reports for last user login activity, querying AD, performing LDAP tasks, compiling DNS reports, adjusting policy for passwords or other environment preferences, resetting passwords and expiration management, configure and manage attached devices to the network, and so much more.

AD is a true powerhouse for management when it comes to handling and organizing a network environment and there's few situations where having it would not provide some benefit at least! Even just for smaller environments using AD can save a lot of time and headache when configuring or adjusting systems, and it makes adding or adjusting users an absolute dream.

But with so much power and flexibility comes a lot of need for know how and a lot of room for things to go wrong. That's why having a range of tools in your proverbial toolbox will help avoid those issues while still letting you take full example of all the muscle that AD has to offer! Many of them are totally free or at least have a free trial so you can check out how they can make your AD managing life much easier.

Solarwinds has created a Large Toolset of more than 20 Tools for Network Admins and Engineers by releasing tons of Free tools for managing your Active Network and any miscellaneous tasks you are doing.

Below is a List of Tools they offer and what they do. This a Great tool for Figuring out what permissions are granted where. This program is all about, as the name implies, LDAP. It's a powerful feature with a lot of depth and it's great that AD has the ability to work with it, but handling it can be a rather fickle process to say the least.

Another program made by Softerra, this particular program gives you a wider range of access than would normally be available via AD. The web-interface is slick and easy to use and helps keep workflow and provisioning nice and easy. It also provides functionality to pull queries from across forests, a remarkably useful function at times. It pushes queries and then displays the results in an intuitive fashion — not much to it, but it does what it needs to do!

It doesn't have a great deal of functionality beyond just keeping an eye on things, but when added to a number of other tools that in and of itself can be crucial! It simply displays a range of statistics on your AD status in a simple to use and simple to access web interface, making it nice and portable for when you need a glimpse of things.

While not technically free this one has a free option and, frankly, is so cheap that it may as well be free for what it does. Provisioning and creating accounts can be something of a hassle, and replication is an ongoing and ever present issue when dealing with AD, especially in large environments. The AD Replication Status tool is simple but it provides feedback on any errors with replication so you can spend a lot less time digging around for what went wrong and just jump right to the fix!

Anyone in medical, financial, or law enforcement fields working IT will be well aware of the sort of headache and regulatory hurdle these kinds of things can provide, and having tools that let you quickly make sure things are as they should be can help a lot.

Most techs and admins are at least vaguely familiar with Power Shell, and it's certainly more than powerful in a general sense as much as with AD specifically. Using Power Shell those who are more familiar with the class command prompt type interface, or perhaps even back from the DOS days, can navigate and handle AD as if it were just another mounted drive or directory. A sibling program to the ADAudit Plus, ADManager is a program more focused on performing management activities rather than just auditing permissions and security.