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Managing Active Directory Users in N-central

N-able
05/12/2026
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And in this video, we're going to talk about on-premise domain user management. Despite, in recent years, the shift to cloud services, a large cohort of MSP's customers still use on-premise Active Directory. So it's important to be able to manage and maintain these user accounts from within your end central environment. End central has a feature that allows you to do just this. Anytime you install an agent onto an Active Directory domain controller, it allows it to bring all the user account information into your end central environment so you can manage those users. To access domain user management in end central, you're going to use the left-hand navigation, click on Actions and Domain User Management. From the service organization level, you will see a list of all the domains that are currently available within your end central environment. If you access this from the customer site level, you will only see domains that pertain to that customer or site. To load the users for a particular domain, simply select the name you want to action. Here, you'll see a list of the Active Directory user accounts. From here, you can take several different actions. You can choose to unlock an account if it's locked, you can enable account if the account has been disabled, or if the user is no longer with the organization, you can disable the account from here as well. You can also use the delete feature to remove old accounts that are no longer required by that organization. And importantly, as it's a common call driver on the help desk, you can reset passwords on end users' accounts from here as well, even prompting them to change password upon next logon and unlocking the account from here if they've locked themselves out as well. In larger domains, where you might have a long list of users, you can also action the user accounts from within the interface itself. So I simply right-click on a user account and I can choose to delete the account from here, unlock, enable, or disable account from here, or reset the password on the account from here as well. You'll also notice a number of different columns with filtering options available. So if you need to quickly find a user, for example, so find Paul, for example, I can simply type in Paul into the filter and quickly access the user from here as well. Alternatively, we can choose to see additional information on user accounts as well. So if we simply just wanna find what users are part of a particular group within Active Directory, I can look and search for groups here. I can also see the account status from here, whether it's currently enabled or disabled, and I can use this option again to filter. So if I wanna just find locked out accounts or disabled accounts, I can do so from here also. You can also see the password status here, whether it expires or when it was last reset. And very importantly here as well, you can see the last login status. So you can actually filter on last login date to find older accounts, maybe that are no longer active within that organization. Maybe initially disable those accounts and then delete your accounts when you confirm with the end user that they are no longer required as well. You also do need to customize this view as well. So if there's information displayed here that's not relevant to you, or if there's additional information like account expiry date, profile path, or home directory, you can choose to include those within your view as well. Security obviously is very important when it comes to user management and all the actions that are carried out by a technician within domain user management are logged within the audit trail. Here we can filter on date, we can filter on user and the domain, the action and the details that were carried out by each user as well. So all actions that are carried out can be tracked and logged within the audit trail as well. So guys, that's just a brief overview of some of the features and functionality of domain user management in Incentral. Hope you found this video useful and we'll see you on the next one.

TL;DR

  • N-central provides centralized management of on-premise Active Directory user accounts through agents installed on domain controllers, eliminating the need to access multiple customer environments separately.
  • Common help desk tasks including password resets, account unlocking, enabling/disabling accounts, and user deletion can all be performed directly from the N-central interface with filtering and search capabilities for large directories.
  • All domain user management actions are logged in a comprehensive audit trail that tracks technician activity, date, domain, action type, and details for security and compliance purposes.

Summary

This tutorial demonstrates how MSPs can manage on-premise Active Directory user accounts directly from N-able N-central's centralized interface. Paul Kelly, N-able Head Nerd, walks through the complete workflow for domain user management, starting with agent installation on Active Directory domain controllers and progressing through common help desk tasks like password resets, account unlocking, and user account lifecycle management. The demonstration covers navigation through the domain user management interface, filtering and search capabilities for large user directories, and the security audit trail that logs all technician actions. Despite the industry shift toward cloud services, many MSP customers continue to rely on on-premise Active Directory, making this centralized management capability essential for efficient service delivery. The feature allows technicians to perform routine account maintenance tasks without switching between multiple management consoles, streamlining operations for both service organization-level and customer site-level administration.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction to Domain User Management
0:35 - Accessing Domain User Management Interface
1:01 - User Account Actions and Operations
1:40 - Filtering and Search Capabilities
3:20 - Security Audit Trail

Key Quotes

0:06 "Despite, in recent years, the shift to cloud services, a large cohort of MSP's customers still use on-premise Active Directory."
0:24 "Anytime you install an agent onto an Active Directory domain controller, it allows it to bring all the user account information into your end central environment so you can manage those users."
3:20 "Security obviously is very important when it comes to user management and all the actions that are carried out by a technician within domain user management are logged within the audit trail."

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  • » Cybersecurity » Endpoint Security
  • » Data Protection
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  • Endpoint Management
  • How-To
  • Technical Deep Dive
  • Identity & Access
  • Active Directory Management
  • MSP Remote Management
  • User Account Administration
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