GPO audit policies not applying

I didn’t realize my last post was the 500th one. Yay to me! :)

Had an issue at work today wherein someone had modified a server GPO to enable auditing but nothing was happening.

The GPO had the following.

And it looked like it was applying (output from gpresult /scope computer /h blah.html).

But checking the local policies showed that it wasn’t being applied.

Similarly the output of auditpol /get /category:* showed that nothing was happening.

This is because starting with Server 2008/ Vista Microsoft split the above audit categories to sub-categories, and starting with Server 2008 R2/ 7 allowed one to set these via GPO

My understanding from the above links is that both these sort of policies can mix (especially if the newer ones are not defined), so not entirely sure why the older audit policies were being ignored in my case. There’s even a GPO setting that explicitly let’s one choose either set over the other, but that didn’t have any effect in my case. (The policy is “Audit: Force audit policy subcategory settings (Windows Vista or later) to override audit policy category settings” and setting it to DISABLED gives the original policy categories precedence; by default this is ENABLED).

The newer audit policy categories & sub-categories can be found under the “Advanced Audit Policy Configuration” section in a GPO. In my case I defined the required audit policies here and they took effect.

Something else before I conclude (learnt from this official blog post).

By default GPOs applied to a computer can be found at %systemroot%\System32\GroupPolicy. Local audit policies are stored/ defined at %systemroot%\system32\GroupPolicy\machine\microsoft\windows nt\audit\audit.csv and then copied over to %systemroot%\security\audit\audit.csv. However, audit policies from domain GPOs are not stored there. This point is important to remember coz occasionally you might found forum posts that suggest checking the permissions of these files. They don’t matter for audit policies from domain GPOs.

In general it is better to use auditpol.exe /get /category:* to find the audit policy settings rather than an group policy tools.