SharePoint Auditing and Monitoring Tool

Auditing plays an important role in smooth SharePoint administration, especially when it comes to meeting regulatory compliance and forensic requirements. To avoid data breaches, it's imperative to stay aware of who from which group accessed what document, and who created or deleted a site or site collection.

There's only so much SharePoint audit logs can do

SharePoint audit log reports let you analyze all activities in your SharePoint environment. However, the native build often falls short, making auditing harder than it should be.

• Difficult to access: Looking up audit reports with the native build is tedious. And, the generated reports aren't categorized by object, which makes them difficult to analyze. The raw data captured in these audit reports isn't user-friendly and the change events are recorded by object ID, making them even more inconvenient to read.
• Inconvenient: Since the reports can only be exported in Excel format, analysis is a huge hassle. And for every site collection, the audit settings have to be separately enabled. So, if a farm contains 45 site collections, each site collection has to be enabled individually. There are better ways to spend your time.
• Inadequate data: If you want to learn anything about a change event, you need the values before and after modification. Being aware that a change occurred with a user’s permissions isn’t enough—you need to know what the permissions were before and after the change to assess the situation accurately. However, SharePoint audit logs fail to provide this information.
• Bloated database: Lastly, SharePoint audit logs are stored on SharePoint's database, testing the limits of its performance. More often than not, overall productivity is slowed by poor performance.

The good news is, you can deal with these limitations

SharePoint Manager Plus , the SharePoint management, auditing, reporting, and monitoring component of AD360, our unified IAM solution, was designed to overcome these limitations and make your job easier. You can generate audit reports for both on-premises and Office 365 SharePoint environments in a central console, unlike in the native build (which makes you go to specific locations in the environment to generate each report). There are a lot of additional benefits to using SharePoint Manager Plus, but here are a few:

• Pre-categorized audit reports make object-specific auditing easy. So, you can look up audit events related to any object, whether it be document libraries, lists, SharePoint users, or groups.
• Information is processed before the reports are generated, meaning IDs are converted into names that help you read the reports without any difficulty.
• Audit reports can be exported in multiple formats, including XLS, CSV, PDF, and HTML. This makes it easier to assess your environment.
• All site collections in the environment can be enabled for auditing together with just a click. You can also choose the different audit events that need to be tracked for site collections.
• You can track the new and old values of a change event to stay aware of what the permissions or titles were previously set and modified.
• Audit logs are stored in SharePoint Manager Plus’ database, and not in SharePoint’s. This doesn't affect the performance of SharePoint, just promotes efficient functioning.
• Audit logs can be archived and restored as needed. This helps you meet compliance regulatory requirements and look up audit logs easily when necessary.
• You can create alerts to receive email notifications for any change events. You can also schedule reports to be emailed to you or any user on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.