Have you ever wanted to monitor who'southward logging into your estimator and when? On Professional editions of Windows, y'all can enable logon auditing to have Windows track which user accounts log in and when.

The Audit logon events setting tracks both local logins and network logins. Each logon issue specifies the user account that logged on and the time the login took place. Yous tin also come across when users logged off.

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Annotation:Logon auditing only works on the Professional edition of Windows, so y'all can't use this if you have a Dwelling edition. This should work on Windows vii, viii, and Windows ten. We're going to cover Windows 10 in this article. The screens might look a trivial unlike in other versions, but the procedure is pretty much the same.

Enable Logon Auditing

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To enable logon auditing, you're going to use the Local Group Policy Editor. It'south a pretty powerful tool, so if y'all've never used it before, it's worth taking some time to learn what it can do. As well, if yous're on a visitor network, do anybody a favor and check with your admin kickoff. If your work computer is function of a domain, information technology's also probable that it'south office of a domain group policy that will supersede the local group policy, anyhow.

To open the Local Group Policy Editor, hit First, type "gpedit.msc," and then select the resulting entry.

In the Local Grouping Policy Editor, in the left-hand pane, drill down to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Audit Policy. In the right-hand pane, double-click the "Audit logon events" setting.

In the properties window that opens, enable the "Success" option to have Windows log successful logon attempts. Enable the "Failure" pick if y'all besides want Windows to log failed logon attempts. Click the "OK" button when you're washed.

You can now close the Local Grouping Policy Editor window.

View Logon Events

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Later yous enable logon auditing, Windows records those logon events—along with a username and timestamp—to the Security log. You tin view these events using Event Viewer.

Hit Start, type "upshot," and and so click the "Outcome Viewer" result.

In the "Consequence Viewer" window, in the left-hand pane, navigate to the Windows Logs > Security.

In the middle pane, you lot'll likely see a number of "Audit Success" events. Windows logs separate details for things similar when an business relationship someone signs on with is successfully granted its privileges. Yous're looking for events with the outcome ID 4624—these stand for successful login events. You tin can see details about a selected event in the bottom office of that middle-pane, but you can also double-click an event see its details in their own window.

And if you scroll downwardly just a bit on the details, you tin can see information you're later—like the user account name.

And considering this is just another result in the Windows event log with a specific upshot ID, you tin also use the Job Scheduler to take action when a logon occurs. You lot can even have Windows email you when someone logs on.

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