Wednesday 19 December 2018

Why does AzureAD advanced reporting and Azure Identity Protection give me conflicting alerts?


This is for any Office 365 Administrator that is using the advanced reporting features of Azure AD Premium P1 and also Azure Identity Protection as part of Azure AD Premium P2.

If you are using this reporting functionality from AADP1 and AADP2 you will no doubt be getting reporting conflicts where Azure Identity Protection is reporting suspicious activity even though you have ring fenced your networks and locations in the Azure Portal. This is a confusing and annoying anomaly that will frustrate you, but here's the answer to the issue. Azure Identity Protection, also known as the Cloud App Security Portal, doesn't honour any of the name locations or trusted locations you have setup in Azure Conditional Access | Named Locations.


Let's take a look!

Here you can see I am in the Azure AD Admin Center. Utilising the advanced reporting features of Azure Ad Premium P1 allows me to get more granular reporting capability from Azure on what is happening in my tenant and how users are authenticating and access Azure and Office 365 services. One of the great features here is adding 'known IP address ranges'. As shown below.



Selecting this takes me to Azure Conditional Access, where I can configure named locations. You can see I have configured my locations below as any good administrator should as this information is used to filter alerts and give information to the system to provide fine tuned alerting to you. When you add a named location in you also have the option of making it trusted - for example to bypass MFA requirements for 'trusted locations' rather than having to specify individual locations that come from this list.


So once I have populated all of this information my advanced reporting features of Azure AD Premium P1 will start to use them - and my alerts will take into account the configuration I have placed here. But what about Azure Identity Protection which is a feature of Azure AD Premium P2?

Well the truth is it doesn't use this configuration data at all - which is a crying shame. You have to configure it all over again. Let's log in and take a look.


You can see I am getting alerts for my Washington Office here, even though it's configured and trusted in the named location section of Azure Conditional Access in the Azure Portal.

So how do I remedy this so I have a unified advanced alerting capability and identity protection platform?

Well you need to add the locations into the Cloud App Security Portal. Specify the cog in the upper right area of the Cloud App Security Portal and select 'IP address ranges'


From here you will have to enter your locations once more.


Once entered, Azure Identity Protection will be able to use these locations in any of the pre-canned policies, or indeed any custom ones you create, to provide the same insight data that you are getting from the advanced reporting feature of Azure AD Premium P1.


And that's it. No more alert conflicts between the two systems where advanced reportings understands that a network is trusted and you get conflicted information from Azure Identity Protection.

The only downside is you will need to remember to update both until Microsoft ingest Azure Identity Protection fully into the Azure Portal (which I hope they will do!) and they share the same metrics and configuration data. Until that time, administer both.

Have fun!