Active Directory Reporting with free ADInspector

I would like to introduce a nice freeware tool for AD reporting to you.

It is easy to use and does not need to be installed. Check your Active Directory for:

Locked user accounts, empty groups and much more…and export the result to .csv

Update 09/18/2015: Simplified Active Directory Reporting with AD Inspector 2015

17 Active Directory Reports

 
Firstware-ADInspector provides IT admins a free and fast possibility to analyze Active Directory. The tool is developped by FirstAttribute. (jump to ↓ Example: Active Directory Reporting – Empty Groups)

You can download it for free here:

The software comes as a FAT client and doesn’t need to be installed. You can just download it, unzip it and run it. The only thing necessary is that you need connection to Active Directory. ADInspector won’t give you any possible report you can think about, but the 17 standard reports here are quiet nice. 

Screenshot: ADInspector Report Overview

 
I really like that it runs fast and answers you little questions without a lot of effort.
To give you an example:
I needed to know how many user where created in the last 10 days.
I just set up the time parameter in the configuration and run the tool – exported the result as .csv and later used the list in a weekly report.

What kind of reports are available? Here is the list:

 The website shows you more detailed information about the Active Directory Analysis possible with the tool.

Active Directory Reporting – Example: Empty groups

Just to give you a short example I want to read out how many empty groups are in a certain folder.

1. Check the report you want to go for and click the yellow folder button (top left) to choose a root folder.
   Alternatively just hit the play button and you will also see the “select folder”-dialog
   
    
2. The “Select”-dialog pops up and you can define a search root here.
   Click the green “Check button” to accept your choice.
   
    
3. Run the report by clicking the green “play” button.
   You will see how many empty groups there are in the selcted group – here it were 13.
   
    
4. Now you have 2 options.
   If you press the “i” info button, you will get information on what empty groups are and in which situation they should be removed.
   Hitting the “magnifying glass” button shows you all the empty groups in a report window.
   

   Click on the “magnifying glass” button to see the report window

    

5. If you need to process the data, for example to use it for a mangement report you can save the data to .csv by clicking the blue “disk” button

Summary

Firstware-ADInspector is a handy small tool for standard Active Directory reporting. If you just want to know how many user didn’t log in the last X days, give it a try. There is no installing needed and you can save your results in a .csv file. What it not does is a very deeply customizable report with lots of additional paramaters. But the reports offered can be set up with some parameters in the configuration (mainly for the duration of the search event or the search root). For very special reports you still have to do some work by your own. But I didn’t expected that and so to me it doesn’t matter, as the tool really does well with the offered reports. Great for a fast overview of what is going on in your Active Directory.

You can find more detailled information on the product website:
Firstware-ADInspector