ADAudit Plus helps Poolcorp gain a bird's-eye-view into its hybrid IT and user privileges

Business challenges

• Hybrid IT auditing: Poolcorp's IT team needed visibility on the actions made by employees, especially domain and account changes, across the organization's on-premises Active Directory and EntraID environments.
• Managing user privileges: Poolcorp's administrative teams also needed a solution that can identify overprivileged employee accounts and ensure that the access privileges are modified with respect to the job functions of the respective employees.

The problem

For Poolcorp's IT team, gaining comprehensive insights into their organization's IT environment was a priority. According to Chris Clark, the systems architect at Poolcorp, the organization required a centralized view of its diverse IT environment, saying that his team required "easy auditing of account and domain changes both on-premises [AD] and Microsoft 365 Entra [ID], knowing who made a change and when and what it was changed from."

Additionally, the organization was also posed with a major security challenge of mitigating privilege creep amongst its support staff. Clark also added that the organization had provided "too many permissions to support employees that were not needed for them to perform their jobs. We need to give them access to do specific tasks in specific places in Active Directory."

The solution

To address Poolcorp's user management and reporting challenges, the organization's IT team deployed ADAudit Plus and ADManager Plus. Poolcorp implemented ManageEngine ADAudit Plus and ADManager Plus, which significantly improved AD visibility, security, and delegation. With ADAudit Plus' change monitoring capabilities, the organization was able to accurately track changes across its on-premises Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and EntraID, allowing the IT team to track changes across its IT ecosystem to a single source, and revert them if necessary.

The reporting capabilities proved valuable for troubleshooting user lockouts, enabling first and second-level support teams to identify issues quickly and resolve them efficiently. “ADAudit Plus is extremely easy to set up and use—it solves so many problems better than using Splunk to track AD changes,” Clark shared.

ADManager Plus helped the IT team implement granular role-based delegation, ensuring that help desk employees were able to contextually delegate administrative tasks to non-administrative staff, “We were able to use ADManager Plus to grant help desk employees specific task-based access while protecting areas of the directory we didn’t want them to change,” Clark explained.

Clark's team found ManageEngine’s support assistance prompt and effective whenever needed. “Support has always been helpful and quick to resolve any issues,” Clark added.

Clark was also upbeat about ADManager Plus, “I think that [ADManager Plus] is a great product and does everything we currently need it to do. I look forward to future enhancements to the product."

About ADAudit Plus

ADAudit Plus is a real-time Active Directory change auditing solution that features file and folder monitoring, plus access and permission change capabilities. With more than 200 event-specific reports and real-time email alerts, it provides in-depth knowledge about changes made to both the content and configurations of Active Directory, Azure AD, and Windows servers. Additionally, ADAudit Plus provides thorough insights on workstation and file server access (including NetApp and EMC). For more information about ADAudit Plus, visit https://www.manageengine.com/products/active-directory-audit/.