UMRA – COM Active Directory Reporting

If you haven’t already download the free trail version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – COM Active Directory Reporting

Running reports or obtaining information is always critical to any business. Having real time data on your active directory environment at your finger tips, is a huge benefit. As you’ve seen in my other posts about the flexibility of UMRA to create and manage Active Directory objects, UMRA also has the ability to gather large amounts of data quickly. With this in mind, we can now create custom reports via a webpage, or portal, and harness UMRA to get this data, and display it quickly. So in this blog post, we will talk about UMRA ability to do UMRA - Active Directory Reporting, and a few tips to help speed up more complex queries and data mining.

UMRA – COM Active Directory Reporting Tips

A lot of our clients want reports regarding Active Directory User data, with this in mind, we will focus on 2 major reports that you might find handy. Now keep in mind, these are not the only reports you can run with UMRA as your data mining tool. You can really run reports on anything in your Active Directory environment (almost anything). The 2 reports we will focus on are “User Password Expiration Dates” and “Total User and Computer Accounts” Reports. But before we get to these 2 reports, I will give you a few tips on how to speed up these queries and data mining.

Tip 1 > When gathering large sets of data, use UMRA DataTables – Not loops within your webpage.

Tip 2 > On Active Directory attributes that require conversion, have UMRA do these calculations, and not your webpage.

UMRA – COM Active Directory Reporting How To

We will keep this topic at a high level, if you need help with connecting to the UMRA COM object through a web page, please see my previous posts. If you need help with looping through UMRA table data, please see previous posts on these topics.

Report - User Password Expiration Dates

Step 1 : Create a UMRA Automation project that create 1 UMRA datatable, with a filter of just users, and users attributes (samaccountname,accountexpires) *NOTE* on the accountexpires attribute its stored in Active Directory as a long integer so have your UMRA datatable convert this value into time/date.

Step 2: Create your webpage to connect to this UMRA datatable, and loop through the table data and display the samaccountname, and accountexpires columns to your webpage (If you need help with this, see previous blog posts)

Step 3: Run your webpage, you will now see usernames, and there accountexpires dates.

Report - Total User and Computer Accounts

Step 1: Create a UMRA Automation project that create 1 UMRA datatable, with a filter of just users, and users attributes (samaccountname)

Step 2: Create another datatable in the same UMRA Automation project, but this time we are going to create filter that datatable for computers, not users, and pull back the samaccount attribute for each.

Step 3: Use the “Manage Table Data” Action, and have it “Get Number Of Rows” in your “users” database, and then Use another “Manage Table Data Action, and have it also get the “Get Number Of Rows” on your computers table.

Step 4: On your webpage, connect to your UMRA Automation project, and get the variables you set for the 2 different “Manage Table Data” actions, and display those on your page.

Step 5: Run your webpage, you will now see the counts for all your user objects, and computer objects in your Active Directory Environment.