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Reporting

One-Liner Wednesday November 23, 2022

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As we are approaching the holiday season  at the end of the year, dates are very important. Everything from counting down the days to the new year to creating those end of the year reports.

With that said, how many times have you had to create a report for the previous month, but it’s  parameters are only StartDate and EndDate? Now, you have to remember how many days are in that month and consider if it’s a leap year or not. And sometimes the first of the month is on a weekend, Holiday, or a day you took PTO so you have to make sure your code doesn’t just go back 30 days as then it may or may not get the whole previous month.  And let’s say for reasons you can’t control,  you can’t have it as a scheduled task to always run on the first of the month?

This one liner(technically 2 one for StartDate and one for EndDate), is the solution you need. It will check which month your in, go to the previous month then find the first and last day of that month. That’s it!

$StartDate = (Get-Date -Day 1).AddMonths(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")

$EndDate = (Get-Date -Day 1).AddDays(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")

If you wanted the past 6 months you could change the -1 to -6 in Start Date. Now you don’t have to manually enter the month date range every time you need a report for the previous month. You could set this as the default parameter, but give yourself the option to change it if you need a different date range.

Documentation:

Get-Date:
Microsoft Learn

Module Monday November 21, 2022

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Since I know everyone knows about Microsoft’s Hyper-V PowerShell, and I’ve mentioned about VMWare’s here, I didn’t want to leave out Nutanix’s PowerShell module for those that use Nutanix. I personally haven’t used this one, but the documentation looks great for it, and you can definitely automate a lot of the processes instead of having to go into the GUI. I’d also recommend creating standard templates of how settings should be for hosts and VM’s which you could then compare with how yours are setup, so you can quickly see what has changed. This is great for a few reasons. 1) You have a base working config saved for future deployments 2) If a bad actor gets in and slowly starts changing things you can catch it 3) You can create reports based off this data.

And if you looking for a great “As Built” Report for your Nutanix, check out the link below where they have created a detailed report with the ability to highlight concerning areas from just running one script!

Nutanix CLI:
PowerShell Gallery

As Built Report – Nutanix
PowerShell Gallery – As Built Report Nutanix

Read-Only Friday November 18, 2022

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It’s coming to the end of the year and only a handful more ROF for this year, which can also mean agreements and renewals for a lot of people. How do you manage them? Do you have dedicated software, excel, sharepoint, SQL, or something else?

Do you have any automation built in for reminders to bring up to management, reminders for yourself, and/or request quotes from vendors? And yes I said for yourself, who enjoys renewing software then realizing you didn’t put in the new license and everything stops..

Going a little deeper, what about  cost wise? Do you have it so you can see upcoming costs and expected costs for the year. I know not all organizations are lucky enough to have enterprise grade software and/or dedicated departments to manage all of this. For smaller organizations, it can easily start out as an excel/sharepoint/google sheet and grow into local/cloud SQL or other scaleable solution. If you start now though, you’ll know what you want and don’t want which will make selecting solutions much easier. And from my years in the industry I can tell you that even with enterprise grade software you will still need to do some custom integrations, just a lot less of them.

One-Liner Wednesday October 26, 2022

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One Liner Wednesday Cyber Security Edition

Want to see the top Malware that hits your 365 Exchange? Try this one liner out

Get-MailTrafficSummaryReport -Category TopMalware -StartDate 08-01-2022 -EndDate 10-25-2022 | Select-Object C1,C2 | out-gridview

This will give you the different types of malware Microsoft has found and how many times it found in since August 1. Then it will display it in a grid view that you can filter. I normally export to Excel/CSV to keep the data as it goes away after 90 days. Bigger organizations I’d recommend pushing it into a database for longer term analytics.

Check out Microsoft Docs and my 365 GitHub Repository for more ideas!

Microsoft Documentation:
Get-MailtrafficSummaryReport

365 Exchange Security Dasboard(Very early stages)
365 Exchange Security Dashboard

My Microsoft 365 GitHub Repository:
Powershell365

Module Monday October 24, 2022

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It’s Module Monday…

Although this module could be on Read-Only Friday, I wanted to show you that not all modules change your environment, and they can be extremely helpful getting information for you so you don’t have to create it or yourself. And with it being Cyber Security Month, why not have an easy way to find changes in your Active Directory.

With that said, today’s module is Jeff Hicks ADReportingTools, which I think the name is pretty obvious of what it does, but definitely check out the GitHub for all the reporting it can do. Here are a few of my favorites.

  • Get-ADDomainControllerHealth – this checks storage space, physical memory, % of security log in use, and critical services not running
  • Get-ADUserAudit – which will search the event logs on your domain controller for that specific user events
  • Get-ADGroupUser – which will display all users in that defined group and who any disabled users in red
  • Get-ADSiteSummary – shows a quick view of your sites and subnets
  • Show-DomainTree – this will show your domain in a tree view in your console
  • New-ADDomainReport – I really like this one, it shows you a nice html formatted report of your domain

Hope you take a look at it and if you see any features you’d like, let Jeff know.

PowerShell Gallery:

ADReportingTools/1.4.0

GitHub:
ADReportingTools

Read-Only Friday October 21, 2022

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It’s Friday, so you know what that means!

I like todays, because it’s another one of those it’s easy, but we either forget to check or believe it’s working but it may not be.

What is it? Event logging and dashboards. I’ll admit the dashboard part isn’t easy, but the event logging is. And I’m not just talking about your scripts(which you should be adding event logging to them when possible), I’m talking about any of your infrastructure that you manage. Even if you have alerting on, how do you know the alerting is actually working? Maybe your script or application you are using to go through the logs has an update but you don’t see it since you haven’t checked it in a month thinking it just works?

It’s always better to be proactive than reactive. Also while going through the logs you may find something else you want to start alerting for. Maybe you adding a new feature to your firewall or you added a print server and you want to setup alerting for those?

Hope you take out some time today and go through your logs, and if you’ve done that, do you have dashboards and/or alerting in place? If so, check those as well, and see if there is anyway you could improve it.

What scripts/modules/applications do you use to manage your event logs and/or create dashboards with?