Administration, Auditing, and Reporting
Administration
Administrators configure managed systems, deploy and manage agents, define policy sets, and manage users and groups. Key administrative tasks include onboarding assets, assigning functional accounts, tuning rotation schedules, and maintaining appliance health (backups, updates, licensing). Understand the principle of least privilege applied to admin roles themselves: not every administrator should see secrets.
Auditing
Every sensitive action generates an audit record: checkouts, releases, approvals, rotations, session launches, and configuration changes. Audit logs should be treated as tamper-evident and retained per policy. Session recordings are part of the audit trail. Traps include assuming audit covers only password events - configuration and session events are also logged - and confusing audit visibility with the ability to modify logs.
Reporting
Built-in reports summarize credential inventory, rotation compliance, access history, and session activity. Reports support compliance evidence (who accessed what, when, and whether approval occurred). Understand that reports draw from audit data; a gap in auditing produces a gap in reporting.
Worked example
An auditor asks who checked out a database credential last month and whether approval was granted. The answer comes from the checkout and approval audit records, cross-referenced with the access policy that applied at the time - not from the credential's current rotation status.
Rule of thumb
If the question is about what happened, it is auditing; if it is about summarizing patterns for compliance, it is reporting. Both depend on complete, retained audit data.