Netwrix Auditor

The website trial shows off the features of the software while also teaching how to perform a user access audit. The user interface is very clean, user-friendly, intuitive, and snappy. The software comes with a lot of explanations for the built-in reports to help users understand what the report is used for. The software also makes it really easy to monitor the organization, with alerts for unacceptable actions or for unusual behavior above thresholds.

Our IT department spent a long time working on getting some of the features and reports working, with some success, but many reports and features were never fixed after a whole year of working with support. Apparently Netwrix support was responsive, but their fixes often failed to work.

Let me start off by saying that there are many things to love about the Netwrix Auditor. If you are looking for a tool that can bring value and accountability to your department, continue reading.

One of the primary things I like about the Netwrix Auditor is the reporting tool; there are reports for anything you can think of. These reports are useful to present to different departments in your company for different things. Management may find utile reports that show all permissions a folder has. This can help them weed out any members that should not have access to things. The IT department may also find useful reports that identity orphaned SIDs. There are also reports that can be used for anomaly detection - meaning, when a mass action (such as a deletion and movement of files) is done, an email will be sent.

Another facet of the Netwrix Auditor I like is the setup of the subscription plans. Unlike the ad-hoc nature of reports, these subscription plans can be used to run certain reports on a schedule. This allows you to always be informed when things are triggered or when looking for a scheduled report needed for management. The alerting feature works great and has never caused an issue.

One last Pro I will mention is how easy it is to upgrade the Netwrix Auditor. When there is a new version being released, upgrading is very straight forward. Upgrading retains your monitoring plans, subscription reports, and also providers better features with the new version.

The only Con I can mention about the Netwrix Auditor is that the reporting feature can appear difficult to use. You will spend some time trying to get reports to work with the fields they give you. Although, it's not difficult, you just need to jump into it. Support will very gladly help you with any issues or bumps you run into; support is amazing!

Given what they offer in reporting, this is my only minor complaint. If you ever find that you are looking for a report they don't have, contact support.

The amount of data you can collect about security events, group changes, object moves and deletions, system and file access (and much more) is astounding, especially considering the price. If I need to track something new that I wasn't thinking of when I bought this software, I only need to dig a little and there's something there already for me to utilize.

The variety of things we can monitor from a system level is fantastic too. Windows domains, file servers, Office 365, VMWare, SharePoint, SQL and more...each type of audit task yields the same types of reports as the other. Easy color coding for quick visual assessment.

Setting up is a cinch. The documentation has just about everything you'll need to get running, and the knowledgebase handles all the extra gotchas that you may run into if you have a temperamental environment :)

Probably one of my favorite things about Netwrix Auditor: no-nonsense licensing.

I think that the UI change from the prior major version to the new was the most jarring. I suspect it wouldn't have been as difficult to understand had I started with the newest UI.