JSI Tip 4955. How do I audit Active Directory objects?

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 314955 contains the following summary:

This step-by-step article describes how to use Windows 2000 auditing to track user activities and system-wide events in Active Directory.

When you use Windows 2000 auditing, you can track both user activities and Windows 2000 activities, which are called events, on a computer. When you use auditing, you can specify which events are written to the Security log. For example, the Security log can maintain a record of both valid and invalid logon attempts and events that relate to creating, opening, or deleting files or other objects. An audit entry in the Security log contains the following information:

An audit policy setting defines the categories of events that Windows 2000 logs in the Security log on each computer. The Security log allows you to track the events that you specify.

When you audit Active Directory events, Windows 2000 writes an event to the Security log on the domain controller. For example, if a user tries to log on to the domain using a domain user account and the logon attempt is unsuccessful, the event is recorded on the domain controller and not on the computer on which the logon attempt was made. This behavior occurs because it is the domain controller that tried to authenticate the logon attempt but could not do so.

Use Event Viewer to view events that Windows 2000 logs in the Security log. You can also archive log files to track trends over time, for example, if you want to determine the use of either printers or files, or if you want to verify the use of unauthorized resources.

To enable auditing of Active Directory objects: