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Microsoft Adds Auditing Features to Azure AD Admin Portal

Microsoft's Azure Active Directory portal for administrators, currently in preview, now includes new auditing features.

The Azure admin portal preview now has options to view audit and sign-in logs, which is a new preview capability that was announced on Tuesday. Filters can be used to refine the details. It's possible to see user and application activities using the auditing preview. The preview can produce graphs and charts for a visual showing of the log data.

It's also possible to use search to filter information using the new audit preview. A search can be based on the user's principal name, date and time, activity and activity type. For instance, the sign-in activity of a particular user can be viewed over the past 30 days.

The new audit preview will work across all resources in a tenancy, Microsoft's announcement added.

Microsoft is also providing APIs that can pass audit log data to applications. There's an Audit API, which can be used to filter activity log information. A Sign-in API can be tapped by applications to show user sign-in information.

Some new Azure admin portal capabilities will require having an Azure AD Premium subscription in place. The new audit feature could end up having that requirement. Microsoft's announcement wasn't specific on that point.

In other Azure AD news, Microsoft announced earlier this month that it has released previews of new Azure AD PowerShell version 2 cmdlets that can be used to manage dynamic groups. The new cmdlets were a top request by users because organizations previously had to "set rules for the creation and population of these groups using the management UX," Microsoft's announcement explained.

Using Azure AD PowerShell to create managed groups will require having an Azure AD Premium subscription in place.

The preview includes a few new cmdlets. One will create and manage a dynamic group. Another lets IT pros create an Office 365 group. Refresh tokens can be revoked using another cmdlet. In addition, the processing of a group can be paused or modified using PowerShell parameters.

Microsoft has also begun establishing a new naming convention for these PowerShell cmdlets. If the cmdlet calls the Microsoft Graph service, it'll get "MS" added in its name. This new naming convention will take effect in a future release, Microsoft indicated.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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