Change Auditor 7.5 - User Guide

Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID Auditing

Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID Auditing

The Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID book contains instructions for the procedures required to audit Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Entra ID. It contains the following topics:

•	Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID Auditing Overview: This section provides a system overview, deployment requirements and considerations, and the extra Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID client components and features.

•	Configuring Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID auditing: This section provides instructions for managing Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID auditing templates.

•	Reports and Searches: This section provides details on the additional search columns available for synchronized environments, and how to create custom reports.

Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID Auditing Overview

Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID Auditing Overview

•	Introduction

•	System overview

•	Client components and features

•	Deployment requirements

 

Introduction

Introduction

Change Auditor provides extensive, customizable auditing of critical activities and detailed alerts about vital changes taking place in Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Entra ID. Continually being in-the-know helps you to prove compliance, drive security, and improve uptime while proactively auditing changes to configurations and permissions.

You can generate intelligent, in-depth reports, protecting you against policy violations and avoiding the risks and errors associated with day-to-day modifications. By correlating accounts across the on-premises and cloud environment, you can easily search all events regardless of where they occurred.

Change Auditor’s consolidated audit platform, which is not available with system provided tools, enhances your ability to secure your directory and resources. Specifically, Change Auditor provides:

•	Detailed information giving you the Who, What, Where, and When for every event.

•	Single console and event format across all platforms.

•	Standardized search allowing you to search by any key field.

•	Consolidated view of on-premises and cloud activity.

•	Correlated on-premises and cloud identities for synchronized environments.

•	Ability to create alerts on any event for both on-premises and cloud activity.

•	Ability to store audit data indefinitely for compliance purposes.

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System overview

System overview

To audit Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID, Change Auditor agents require access to the tenant. A web application, which is an Microsoft Entra object, is used to grant this access to external programs, such as Change Auditor.

In addition, to configure and maintain Exchange Online mailbox auditing, Change Auditor agents must be granted access to the Exchange Online organization.

The following describes the integration points and process required for auditing:

1	Users configure an Microsoft 365 or an Microsoft Entra auditing template and select an agent to receive events. The following credentials are required:

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An account with the Global Administrator role. This account is used to create the web application and assign the required permissions for Change Auditor to perform auditing. After the web application is created, the credentials are no longer used. The agent retrieves the web application ID and key and securely stores them. The agent uses the ID and key to retrieve events from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID.

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For Microsoft 365 Exchange Online auditing, an account with the Exchange Administrator role is also required. This account is used to configure the mailbox auditing settings in the tenant that are defined in the template (such as enabling auditing of owner activity). The agent periodically uses these credentials to validate or update auditing settings, so they are securely stored in Change Auditor.

2	The agent connects to the tenant and creates the web application.

For Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, the agent also connects to your Exchange Online organization and configures mailbox auditing.

3	The agent periodically gathers events.

For Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, the agent also retrieves mailbox auditing settings to validate configuration.

4	The agent processes events and forwards them to the coordinator.

5	The coordinator forwards events to the Change Auditor database.