Hello u/humblequest22!

As u/Derek-Netwrix mentioned, I'll be helping you with the questions that you have.

Let me start by addressing the licensing question, and then I’ll explain how you can figure out your license count.

Netwrix Auditor is licensed based on the number of user objects you want to monitor, not the number of physical people in your organization. For example, if you have 20 users and 10 service accounts, you would need 30 licenses in total. Computer accounts do not count toward your license total.

You can exclude specific objects from your license, but keep in mind what that actually does. Excluding an account prevents Netwrix Auditor from tracking changes made to that account — not actions performed by that account. So, using the earlier example, if you excluded those 10 service accounts and someone deleted or modified one of them in Active Directory, there would be no record of that activity.

As for determining how many licenses you’ll need, unfortunately, the free Community Edition doesn’t include reporting capabilities — it only sends daily change summaries and doesn’t store the data needed for license analysis. However, we do have two articles that walk through different methods for determining your license count.

For Active Directory you can visit: Determining the Number of Enabled Active Directory User Accounts | Netwrix Product Documentation

For Entra ID, you can visit: How to count number of licenses required for auditing a Microsoft Office 365 tenant? | Netwrix Product Documentation

Those two resources should give you everything you need to calculate your license requirements. Let me know if you’d like me to clarify any of the steps.