How Rio Grande Streamlined AD Lockout Tracking with ManageEngine ADAudit Plus
About Rio Grande
Founded in 1944, Rio Grande, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is a manufacturer and wholesale supplier of infrastructure that supports jewellery making, which include tools, equipment, gemstones, and findings. Additionally, Rio Grande also provides support services to organizations via its platform Jewelry Tech Team, and offers educational courses and professional programs such as RioPro and Rio for Schools.
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Country
United States -
Industry
Manufacturing -
Employee size
201-500
Business challenges
Inefficient lockout tracking: Prior to implementing ADAudit Plus, identifying the source of Active Directory (AD) lockouts required manually sifting through event logs—an unreliable and time-consuming process.
Lack of insight into user behavior: The IT team lacked visibility into users repeatedly entering incorrect passwords, potentially signalling poor password practices or security concerns.
The problem
Richard Carreras, the senior systems administrator at Rio Grande, recalled the inefficiencies their team faced when diagnosing AD lockouts: “We had to look through event logs to find where someone was being locked out from, and that was a painful process that most times didn’t even give a good result.” This manual approach not only consumed valuable time but also yielded inconsistent outcomes, making it difficult to support end users effectively. Rio Grande needed a more streamlined, accurate, and user-friendly way to monitor lockouts and user behavior within their AD environment.
The solution
Rio Grande deployed ADAudit Plus, ManageEngine's unified auditing solution, to address their immediate need: account lockout analysis. “We have only used it for tracking lockouts,” Carreras noted. With ADAudit Plus, Help Desk technicians were quickly able to pinpoint the source of lockouts, reducing time spent on diagnosis and improving user support efficiency. “The queries we have used are always accurate and effective for my Help Desk IT team,” he added.
The initial results gained from ADAudit Plus have prompted interest among Rio Grande's IT team in exploring more features, such as scheduled reporting and user behavior analytics. “It shows us who is constantly putting in bad passwords,” Carreras said. He said that the visibility into poor password hygiene has ignited policy-level discussions, such as the decision to implement password vaults for non-IT users.
Carreras also highlighted the responsiveness of ManageEngine's support team: “Many times, the issues were resolved in one interaction. Sometimes, we might require a license or something to implement reports. But the team always shows us workarounds using event IDs.” These experiences reinforced ADAudit Plus’ practical value and its potential to scale with their auditing needs.
About ADAudit Plus
ADAudit Plus is a unified auditing solution that provides full visibility into activities across Active Directory (AD), Entra ID, file servers (Windows, NetApp, EMC and more), Windows servers, and workstations—all in just a few clicks. ADAudit Plus helps organizations streamline auditing, demonstrate compliance, and enhance their identity threat detection and response with capabilities like real-time change auditing, user logon tracking, account lockout analysis, privileged user monitoring, file auditing, compliance reporting, attack surface analysis (for AD, Azure, AWS, and GCP), UBA, response automation, and AD backup and recovery. For more information about ADAudit Plus, visit www.manageengine.com/products/active-directory-audit/.