Now let's move on to reporting.
Generating historical user activity reports is
commonplace in many organizations, and unfortunately,
it's not enabled by default when you install the RRAS role on
Windows server so administrators must perform some additional
tasks to enable this feature.
When the Routing and Remote Access Service is installed,
there is an option to enable what's called accounting,
and in particular, we're interested in configuring inbox accounting,
which is preferable over RADIUS accounting.
Enabling inbox accounting allows for the long‑term storage of user activity
data for which administrators can define retention periods,
and ultimately,
generate reports for any user activity that occurred during that timeframe.
The information available in these reports is the same
information you saw in a previous lesson when we were
looking at current user activity.
When inbox accounting is enabled and configured,
a Windows internal database is installed and user
activity is logged to that database.
Reports are generated from information stored in that database as well.
This database is essentially a SQL database,
and as such, requires some periodic maintenance to maintain optimal performance.
To support this,
I've developed a PowerShell module that includes a variety of tools
that administrators will find helpful in this regard.
Using my PowerShell module,
administrators can back up and restore the inbox accounting database,
they can compress the database to recover disk space,
and optionally,
relocate the database from the default location of
the C drive to a different disk, if required.
A word of caution though,
moving the inbox accounting database from its default
location is not formally supported by Microsoft,
so please exercise caution when you're using this option, and of course, use this technique at your own risk.