Schedule a report about Active Directory

Active Directory is a critical application that can be time-consuming to monitor and troubleshoot. In the ExtraHop Bundle for Active Directory, we've compiled dashboards that provide a comprehensive top-level view of Active Directory data that makes it easy to watch for potential problems.

To help you easily monitor changes, you can schedule a report for your Active Directory dashboard. A scheduled report delivers a PDF file of dashboard data to any email recipient you specify.

In this walkthrough, we'll show you how to download and apply the bundle to your ExtraHop system, and how to schedule a bi-weekly report for your stakeholders about the health of your Active Directory environment.

Note:You can only schedule reports from a Command appliance or Reveal(x) 360.

Prerequisites

Download the ExtraHop Active Directory Bundle

Before you can upload the Active Directory Bundle to your ExtraHop system, you must download the bundle from the ExtraHop website.

  1. Download the Active Directory bundle.
    Note:This walkthrough is based on the Active Directory v4 bundle.
  2. If you have not already logged in to the ExtraHop website, click Login in the right pane and then specify a valid username and password.
  3. Click Download Now.
  4. Save the JSON file to a location on your local machine.

Upload and apply the Active Directory bundle to your ExtraHop system

In the following steps, you will upload and install the bundle you downloaded from the ExtraHop website on your Command appliance or Reveal(x) 360.

  1. Log in to the Command appliance or Reveal(x) 360 through https://<extrahop-hostname-or-IP-address>.
  2. Click the System Settings icon in the upper right corner.
  3. Click Bundles.
  4. On the Bundles page, click Upload Bundle.
  5. Click Choose File, and then select the Active Directory .json file that you downloaded in the previous section.
  6. In the Install Options section, select the following checkboxes:
    1. Select the site where you want to install the bundle.
    2. Select the Apply 9 included assignments checkbox.
      This option assigns the bundle to the metric sources included with the bundle. In most cases, it is best to apply the default assignments.
    3. Select the Overwrite existing content checkbox.
      This option overwrites any objects that have the same name as objects in the bundle. If you have existing system objects with the same name that you want to preserve, you must rename those objects to avoid overwriting them with the objects in the bundle.
  7. Click Install, and then click Done. Your bundle is installed and listed in the table!

Configure the Active Directory triggers

In the following steps, you will enable and configure a trigger to mirror the lockout and privileged account settings in your Active Directory environment.

  1. Click the System Settings icon .
  2. Click Triggers.
  3. Enable each trigger in the Active Directory v4 bundle by completing the following steps.
    1. In the table, click a trigger name beginning with AD.
    2. Clear the Disable Trigger checkbox to enable the trigger.
    3. Click Save and Close.
  4. Modify specific fields in the Kerberos trigger to match your Active Directory accounts by completing the following steps.
    1. In the table, click AD: Kerberos and then click the Editor tab.
    2. Set the failedLoginDisableInterval constant to the match the value of the Reset account lockout counter after policy setting in your Active Directory environment.
    3. Set the accountLockoutDuration constant to the value of the Account lockout duration policy setting in your Active Directory environment.
    4. Add the complete names of any privileged accounts in your environment to the priv_names list and any partial matches to the priv_regex list. Examples of privileged accounts include:
      var priv_names = {'admin', 'administrator', 'root', 'ss', 'sys',
              'sysadmin, 'informix'}
    5. Click Save and Close.

Create, schedule, and save a report

In the following steps, we'll show you how to schedule a weekly report that runs on Mondays and Thursdays at 7:00 am. We'll also show you how to send the report to a colleague, for example, someone who manages authentication services at your company.

  1. Click Dashboards at the top of the page, and then click the Active Directory Overview dashboard in the left pane.
    Note:Each report can only link to one dashboard. You can select any dashboard that you own or has been shared with you to create a report.
  2. In the upper right corner of the dashboard page, click the command menu and then select Scheduled Reports.


    A Scheduled Reports page appears that displays all the reports stored on the Command appliance. If this is your first report, this page will be empty.
  3. In the upper right corner, click Create.
  4. In the Report Name field, the name of the dashboard is displayed. Let's remove the host information of the connected site from the title, as shown in the following figure.


  5. Let's jump down the page to set the report schedule. In the Time Interval section, select the time frame of dashboard data that you want to display in the report PDF file. For this walkthrough, let's report on the last 4 days of data. Click the Last field and then type 4.


    Note:For more information on how to configure each field, see Create a scheduled report.
  6. In the Report Frequency section, set the email delivery schedule. For this walkthrough, we'll send a weekly report on two different days at 7:00 am. Complete the following steps:
    1. Click the At drop-down list and select 07:00. This setting schedules the delivery of the report for 7:00 am.
      The system time that is set for your Command appliance or Reveal(x) 360 determines the time zone that is displayed when configuring your report. For more information about configuring the time zone for your appliance through the ExtraHop Administration settings, see Configure the system time.
    2. Select the checkboxes next to M and Th to schedule the delivery of the report for Monday and Thursday.


  7. To add your colleague's email address, scroll down to the Send To section. Click the Email Addresses field and type the email.


    Note: If you want to receive a copy of the report, add your email address to this field, separated by a comma. The ExtraHop system does not store email addresses for ExtraHop user accounts.
  8. (Optional): Click Send Now to send a test email to the recipient.
  9. Click Done. Your scheduled report now appears on the Scheduled Reports page, as shown in the following figure.


  10. In the bottom right corner of the page, click Done again to return to your dashboard.
Your colleague will receive an similar email to the following example below with the attached PDF report file.

Note:In the top right corner of the PDF file, click the View report on ExtraHop link to access the dashboard that generated the report. For ExtraHop users, the link opens the Command appliance or Reveal(x) 360 and sets the dashboard to the time interval listed in the report. You can now investigate metrics in more detail from the dashboard.

Add another email address to a saved report

If you want to make changes to a scheduled report, you can access it at any time. Let's add the email address for a new stakeholder to our Active Directory report.

  1. From the dashboard page, click the command menu in the upper right corner, and then select Scheduled Reports.
    Note:Scheduled reports are only available from the command menu on a dashboard page.
  2. In the Report Name column, click the title of your report.
  3. Scroll down to the Send To section.
  4. Click the Email Addresses field.
  5. Type a comma after the first email address and then type the new email address.


  6. Click Save.
  7. Click Done to return to your dashboard. The scheduled report for this walkthrough is now updated.

Next steps

Over time, you might want to pause the delivery of the report by disabling a scheduled report. Or you might want to make changes to your dashboard to display different charts or data. For more information about changing a dashboard, check out these resources:

Here are additional walkthroughs about building dashboards from scratch to monitor protocol metrics:

Last modified 2023-11-07