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There are plenty of solutions to choose from, but Lepide's Auditor Suite stands out, as it combines a superb range of reporting features with extreme ease of use.

Naturally, Active Directory and Group Policy auditing are 'must have' features, but Lepide goes much further, as the suite also includes reporting for Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint. It provides complete visibility, allowing administrators to keep track of all critical changes and to see who made them, when they made them and where.

Installation really is a breeze, as it only took 10 minutes to load the complete Auditor Suite on a basic Windows 7 desktop. For testing, we used a Windows Server 2012 R2 AD domain controller, along with Exchange 2013 and SQL Server 2014 hosts.

The main console is very easy to use and clearly capable of delivering high levels of easily accessible information. We particularly liked the Radar screen, which keeps an eye on all audited systems and updates its information every two minutes.

Six colour blocks at the top provide a highly visible count of changes being tracked for each application. Beneath these are a heap of graphs and charts showing areas such as the top admins, changes graded by criticality, trends and a daily calendar view.

The 360 degree dashboard shows everything occurring for all audited systems and, although the graphs can't be moved around the interface, you can select different time periods to view. Extra tabs are provided for each individual system, and we were able to add our own dashboards and customise them to suit.

Live Feeds are a valuable feature, as we could link alerts to these and have them displayed at the side of the dashboard. We were able to choose from hundreds of predefined alerts for AD, Group Policy, Exchange and SQL Server modifications, and also link them up with emails.

One very smart feature is the option to link alerts with Lepide's iOS app and we tested this on our iPad. From the Lepide console, we created an account and used the iOS app to scan in the QR code it presented straight from the monitor.

Once we'd entered the account details, our iPad started to receive Live Feeds straight from the Auditor Suite host. To test response times, we created a new email user account and, within two minutes, the iPad app had this posted in its live feed.

Lepide monitors system health and provides graphs for CPU and memory utilisation, plus system uptime, along with tables showing running services, performance counters, replication status and more. For our SQL Server host, we viewed more information on connected users, file I/Os, disk activity and waiting tasks.

Audit reports can be run on-demand or at scheduled intervals and Lepide provides a huge range, so we could see clearly what changes had been made, when they occurred, who made them and to what. Filters can be applied to fine-tune the information - and comparison reports used to see what changes occurred over a specific period.

The backup facilities for AD and Group Policy can be used to restore swiftly any AD object directly from the console. There's even a separate web server console, which allows users to access reports without going near the main console.

Lepide's Auditor Suite provides a wealth of information about business-critical systems and presents it all in a well designed central console. We found the complete suite remarkably easy to deploy and the perpetual licensing scheme makes it one of the most affordable change auditing solutions on the market. CS

Product: Auditor Suite 15.2
Supplier: Lepide Software
Tel: +44 (0) 845 594 3766
Web site: www.lepide.com
Price: Up to 1,000 users - £6.25 per user, exc. VAT