UMRA – Active Directory Reporting

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UMRA – Active Directory Reporting

I was recently asked my one of our clients to create an automated way to pull active directory details in real time. Now, with this said, there are TON of reports you can generate in real time with UMRA on the backend grabbing all your data. Now, this blog post will really just go over how UMRA can pull data mine active directory in real time, but also I want you to be aware that since UMRA has the ability to pull from other systems other then active directory. You can now really create your own web based / portal reporting module tool. Ok, so 2 of the requests that I was tasked with to create are, “All Users Status” so a total count of users who are disabled, and users who are enabled, and “All Computer Status”, so same concept, they wanted to know all computer, and there current status. There are 2 ways you can take this approach when creating custom UMRA report. You can log all your data to a database that is pulled with UMRA or you can store all your data into XML files, and then read for those files. Why put them in XML files you ask? Some of your clients don’t have databases available to them, so this way, we can now create those custom UMRA reports, without connecting or requiring a database.

UMRA – Active Directory Reporting Tips

So anytime you are creating a Web Based Reporting Tool, you need to figure out 2 things, where to get the data, and how to display the data. So we already know where we will be getting the data, in our case it will be Active Directory, my client didn’t need to pull any additional information from any other systems. Ok, now we just need to know how we are going to display this back to the web page. So here are some of the steps at a high level, on how I was able to get this custom active directory reporting working.

All the steps below can be used for either Computer Object Reports, or User Account Reports.

Step 1 : Create a UMRA Automation Project that creates a table of ALL users.
Tip – You most likely already have UMRA Automation Project that does this, and it’s ok to reuse current script that may do this.
Tip – Here is a link on “How to create a table in UMRA”

Step 2: So for this step, you will need to decide on if you’re going to store your data in an XML file or database, again both are nice, it’s just up to what you have available to you. Now,Create a web page that will loop thought your database or XML file you created in your UMRA Automation Project. There are a lot of resources online on how to loop through a database, or XML file of data.
Tip – You most likely already have a webpage that does this, if you’ve been following the blogs.
Tip – Here is a link to “how to loop through a data table” Step3: You can do this step within step 2, or within your webpage. For a more speedy report generation, you can store the actual status of the computer or user account details in the XML file or Database. What I did in this step was store the status of the objects in the XML files, and when the user pulled up the custom report, it would show the status. I displayed a time/date when the report was generated, and another hyperlink to rerun the project, and get that data in real time.

UMRA – Active Directory Reporting Photos