KISS for MIM – Autosync

This one has been long overdue and about time that the community realizes how easy it can make your daily life with FIM/MIM.

A wonderful tool which keeps our engine purring like a kitten and all the cogs moving – Autosync written by @RyanLNewington

Since the past two year or so, it has evolved and now it is becoming mainstream with him making it more user friendly, GUI enabled and with KISS strategy (Love the strategy – Keep It Simple Stupid!!!).. It has now culminated as AutoSync.

We’ve worked together and I’ve done a lot of testing (somehow I have the notorious name of bug finder – I find them or say they find me in every product I’ve touched – FIM / MIM / Google / Lithnet / Oracle MA / Generic LDAP MA <– don’t even get me started with that one)

It’s extremely simple to use and self explanatory. It installs as a service, and has a easy to read XML config (no need to dive into as GUI makes it easy) and an “Execution Monitor” to show you the status of allĀ  your runs.

Some of the features to list

  • Auto detect all MA in the environment and list them for configuration.
  • Automatically detect and prepopulate run profiles tab with best matching one.
  • Advance trigger capability to detect changes in the MA source and run only when needed
  • Ability to make changes to individual MA and restart only that component.
  • Ability to mention a list of MA’s not to run if a particular MA is running (to give priority or avoid deadlock situations)
  • One-Click button to create MPR / Set and service account in FIMService which helps in change detection in FIM/MIM Service.
  • Easy to configure and send mail notification of errors and customize it according to the errors you want to see / or ignore
  • Clear run history and store it as a maintenance task.
  • Different execution modes according to your choice (Supported / Exclusive / Unsupported)

The above is definitely not an exhaustive list and there are many more hidden and advance features which I can cover if it makes it to the final cut.

Let’s take an example on how we can utilize it in real world very easily. No coding experience needed.

We have an environment with 9 Management Agents (not the biggest in the world out there by far). We have some business rules which bind us to set provisioning times and deprovisioning times. Which means we need to keep the wheel moving – always and in sync.

Lithnet Autosync has a very easy to understand GUI interface. We can set which profiles to run to confirm an export (Confirming Import) or say which profile to run if the MA hasn’t run for X amount of time – scheduled import (which you can set as well).

For AD / LDS / LDAP MA we have change detection capabilities which basically runs the delta import / Full Import (whatever you configure) only when it detects a change for the system.

In the above example you can see I have also configured a “scheduled interval” which runs a full import for the MA every day at 2am. We do this to make sure the system is clean and up-to-date with the source. I have configured it for all the MA to run daily at different time intervals during non business hours so that the system is “clean” when we come back the next day. You can also configure them run exclusively to each other so that no clash occur (if that is a concern in your system).

You can also do change detection by writing power shell scripts and then running import run profile. We use an SQL based MA (ACMA) where we use such and example where the script looks at the Object Delta table and makes runs the DI (Delta Import) profile only if a change is detected. It can be as little as every second check but I run it every 5 second.

There are more such examples in “C:\Program Files\Lithnet\AutoSync\Examples” folder once you install it. We also have scripts to detect changes in a PostGres DB.

There is so much more we do with it. There are some MA which we use just for versioning purpose. So we simply have them as “unconfigured” so they are not used in the run.

Two most useful features I would like to show you are

Execution Mode

The text below are self explanatory but in a nutshell

  • Supported (Recommended): What Microsoft dictates – Never run sync profiles while any other profile is running. Import and export profiles of different MA can still run in parallel. When a sync profile runs its take precedence lock and doesn’t allow other profiles to run (they queue up)
  • Exclusive Mode (I call it the SloMo Mode): Every run profile in every MA are run exclusively. Slowest mode and possibly the safest mode if you are not concerned with timings and speed.
  • Unsupported Mode (Against the Bible): I use this quite often as I am confident of our environment and what we need in terms of SLA to provision / deprovision users. The difference in this mode v/s supported is that in this mode a sync profile can run while other MA are running their import / export profile.

Execution Monitor

This is where you can keep an eye on things like what is MA is running, what profile is running, what has the lock and what others are waiting to run next.

You can see a lot of live and useful information there.

  • You can see two MA are executing Full Import (FI) – A Play button indicates that
  • You can see that an MA has a lock and its preparing to start a Delta Sync (DS) and then after that it has Delta Import (DI) and EALL (Export All) queued up.
  • Another MA wants to run a delta sync (DS) and is waiting to take lock from the previous MA.
  • You can click on the MA and see the run history and logs of what it has done (depicted in the windows below)
  • As you would have guessed – my system is running in unsupported mode currently.
  • You can stop all execution and/or stop and cancel all runs from the button on top.
  • You can also uncheck the “Automatically start executors when service starts” so that when Autosync service starts it will not start any executions – handy when you want to check all config before you kick off the syncs.

There is so much you can do with the package that I haven’t even begin to list them here.

Hope this small post has given you some insight on the capabilities of Autosync and the potential it has to radicalize and make your environment more friendly and easy to use.

Let me know if you need a solution with AutoSync and I can probably help you with that….

Fixing MIM Error: The dimage indicates an update or replace operation, but the image doesn’t exist.

So there was a delete operation sent to an AD MA. It was deleted successfully but on import (Full / Delta) MIM was still seeing the object with a staging error

Error:Ā The dimage indicates an update or replace operation, but the image doesn’t exist.

Cause: Unknown – The Object Information was corrupted in connector space.

Resolution: Did some digging with Microsoft and came up with the solution

  • Open SQL Server management studio and logon. Backup FIMSynchronizationService database.
  • In a new query script, input the below command

 

 

  • You can get the RDN from the object corrupted.
  • After that, record the object_id from the query result, which we will use in the later statements.
  • Run the below statements to turn it into a phantom

 

  • Stop the FIM service.
  • Delete the record via the below commands

 

  • Restarted the FIM Services
  • Run the FIM Sync to see if the issue fixed.

FIM/MIM Powershell: XPath Demystified

I have been promising to get this post out there.. So here it is..

If you make extensive use of Lithnet ResourceManagement PowershellĀ for MIM/FIM (You shouldĀ if you don’t) you will probably be using the cmdlets “Search-Resources” or “Search-ResourcesPaged” which require an “-XPATH” input.

Now my xpath is real bad in for a complicated search.

Thankfully Ryan (Lithnet God) has written a few tools to make it easier for us to write xpath queries. We would use his cmdlets like New-XPathQuery , New-XPathQueryGroup and New-XPathExpression

Let’s start with simple query:Ā Find everyone whose AccountName (string) starts with “P”

Output

/Person[(starts-with(AccountName, ‘P’))]

Easy yeah?

Lets do a boolean: Find every user for whom accountDisabled (Boolean) is present

Output

/Person[((accountDisabled = true) or (accountDisabled = false))]

 

Lets do a complex one: Find all users who Email Starts with “P” and are not disabled

Output

/Person[((starts-with(Email, ‘P’)) and (accountDisabled = False))]

 

You can see how you can build on this..

One final one: Find all accounts which have an email address starting with P and are not disabled or which have an AccountName and have Email containing “p@”

Output

/Person[(((starts-with(Email, ‘P’)) and (accountDisabled = False)) or ((starts-with(AccountName, ‘%’)) and (contains(Email, ‘p@’))))]

 

Above searches might not make sense logically in real world scenarios but what I am trying to show here is that how easy it is to build complex XPath search strings without knowing the XPath language and doing it pretty easily on Powershell.. (And don’t get me started how many times I have messed up the brackets šŸ˜› )

Enormous potential and implantation capabilities if you come to think of it..

Migrating Lost Identities from AD to MIM

Setting up a new identity system from scratch is so easy.. but we know that kinda never happens… we are always migrating from an old system to new or changing an existing system due to business changes.

We went through the same process whereby we went from an OpenLDAP (ODSEE) being our primary source to FIM/MIM pushing out to AD. We were syncing identities manually from ODSEE to AD via Perl scripts in the old days..

So after the original migration done we have a lot of identities in AD not joined to MIM i.e. Disconnectors as we know them. This was because as per our policy we always added / modified from ODSEE -> AD but never a delete. Thus it left a lot of users and groups in AD which never came across in the initial migration.

So once the migration was complete, the big mammoth task came to migrate the unknowns from AD -> MIM and then join the identities in AD.

Using few wonderful tools suite called Lithnet written byĀ @RyanLNewington

NOTE: Always remember, my script are as-is and have lots of rules and logics specific to my environment and business needs. Its there to give a basic understanding on what can be done. You will obviously have to modify it for your environment and needs.

REQUIREMENTS

  • Migrate AD Disconnectors to MIM Service
  • Join them to AD
  • Make sure no existing values are overwritten in AD like sAMAccountName, DN, DisplayName etc
  • Make sure membership (member) is not lost. memberOf is not cared for atm as that will take care of itself (Point 4 below).
  • Sync Engine SHOULD NOTĀ be provisioning. Stop the syncs (not service itself)

LOGIC

I wrote two different scripts – one to migrate users and one to migrate groups. There are some things to note here

  1. We have our own business rules engine called ACMA to which we provision all our identities which then generates all the required attribute values according to our business rules. So you will see each object being written to both FIMService and ACMA DB (SQL). Do have a look at it.. Its powerful yet so simple… Must have…
  2. Ā We have a unique ID which is pushed to all system called monashObjectID which is basically a random guid which is generated in ACMA DB. We use this to have a constant ID between all system and thus later helpful to join ID etc.
  3. Due to the above point, my script assumes that all objects in AD , if they have monashObjectID means they are connected to FIM/MIM. Thus, on reverse, if they don’t have it means they have to be migrated.
  4. Simplification of OUs:Ā Due to our previous messy environment we have over 100-200 OU’s in AD where all these objects exist. In the new age, we have simplified it and MIM only manages 8-10 OU’s. Therefore according to the “Type” of the object being migrated they are moved to the respective new OU in AD prior to migration (you need rights to do so in AD if you migration account doesn’t so already). Again you can comment out the whole function if its not required.
  5. Groups gets tricky. As they can be member of another group and if they group doesn’t already exist in MIM, it will loose membership once imported, I decided to get around it by scriptingĀ a check that if the group has members and if all of those members have monashObjectID then dump them in a CSV file.Ā Thus this migration is run multiple times.
    1. Create 1st batch of CSV for those groups who don’t have members or which all members exist in MIM (by checking their monashObjectID as that comes from MIM)
    2. Migrate them
    3. Export to AD – this will write out monashObjectID for the newly migrated groups
    4. Repeat step a-c till all are done.

USER MIGRATION SCRIPT

Will start will user migrations as they can be members of a group. Again remember, loads of logic for our environment.

CSV Requirements

The CSV requires the following fields

  • Name: sAMAccountName of the user to be migrated
  • Type: We have accounttypes in our environment like person / service / custom etc. Need to mention that (or modify code to remove it)
  • OrgUnit: We need to mention an OrgUnit DisplayName for each user to which it belongs to (our environment specific again)
  • Owners: This is to mention the owner / supervisor of the user. They are sAMAccountName of already existing users in MIM. They can be multiple with ; separating them.
Script

Rundown
  • Script records everything via transcript command so you can set and forget, come back later and see what broke or potentially could break (loss of membership my main concern). Saves it toĀ D:\ADUserMigration-{CSVFileName}.log
  • Asks for CSV file on run.
  • If the Ā “Type” is missing in CSV it will skip that user (MUST in our logic)
  • Moves the account to respective OU in AD as per the account type.
  • Checks if the user doesn’t have monashObjectID – thus good to migrate.
  • Creates the object in FIMService using LithnetRMA
    • Depending on the type either we set expiry date to never (9999-12-31) or two years from date of migration
    • Checks the owner if its a person or a group and then looks it up if it exits in MIM and adds it as owner.
    • If no owner then we set a default account we have as owner
    • Checks OrgUnit and if found it adds it to the object else sets a default OrgUnit.
  • Checks if the memberOf exists in MIM and adds the user to those groups in MIM.
  • Creates the object in ACMA
  • Repeats the steps above for all users in the CSV
  • Sync the identities in MIM via MIIS Powershell
    • Disables MRE Provisioning
    • DI the FIMService
    • DS / Commit just the ones which were migrated into MV (as its prod others could come in from Portal which needs MRE rules and thus excluding them)
    • DI ACMA MA
    • DS / Commit just the ones which were migrated into MV – this should join them due to our join rules looking for same fimserviceobjectID which was written to ACMA DB during create
    • DI AD MA – all moved objects will now show in correct OU in CS
    • DS / Commit just the ones which were migrated into MV – this will join due to our join rules looking for same sAMAccountName.
    • Enable provisioning
    • DS all of them again to make sure MRE rules apply to those objects for any provisioning if required.

Done..

Speed

Can’t remember to be honest but was quite quick (had nearly none to do for accounts)

GROUPĀ MIGRATION SCRIPT

Remember, loads of logic for our environment.

CSV Requirements

The CSV requires the following fields

  • Name: sAMAccountName of the groupĀ to be migrated
  • Type: We have account types in our environment like UserGroup / ServiceManagedGroup / IdMAuthZGroup etc. Need to mention that (or modify code to remove it)
  • ServiceID: For our environment – mandatory.
  • Owners: This is to mention the owner / supervisor of the user. They are sAMAccountName of already existing users in MIM. They can be multiple with ; separating them.
  • OrgUnit: We need to mention an OrgUnit DisplayName for each user to which it belongs to (our environment specific again.

Script

Rundown
  • Script records everything via transcript command so you can set and forget, come back later and see what broke or potentially could break (loss of membership my main concern). Saves it toĀ D:\ADGroupMigration-{CSVFileName}.log
  • Asks for CSV file on run.
  • If the Ā “serviceID” is missing in CSV for a ServiceManagedGroupĀ it will skip that user (MUST in our logic)
  • Moves the groupĀ to respective OU in AD as per the account type.
  • Checks if the groupĀ doesn’t have monashObjectID – thus good to migrate.
  • Creates the object in FIMService using LithnetRMA
    • Depending on the type either we set expiry date to never (9999-12-31) or two years from date of migration
    • Sets all as Security and Global groups.
    • Checks the owner if its a person or a group and then looks it up if it exits in MIM and adds it as owner.
    • If no owner then we set a default account we have as owner
    • Checks OrgUnit and if found it adds it to the object else sets a default OrgUnit.
    • Checks each member of the group and if they exist then adds them – else will spit out a warning that they will loose membership in AD (good to have logs eh?)
  • Checks if the memberOf exists in MIM and adds the user to those groups in MIM.
  • Creates the object in ACMA
  • Repeats the steps above for all users in the CSV
  • Sync the identities in MIM via MIIS Powershell
    • Disables MRE Provisioning
    • DI the FIMService
    • DS / Commit just the ones which were migrated into MV (as its prod others could come in from Portal which needs MRE rules and thus excluding them)
    • DI ACMA MA
    • DS / Commit just the ones which were migrated into MV – this should join them due to our join rules looking for same fimserviceobjectID which was written to ACMA DB during create
    • DI AD MA – all moved objects will now show in correct OU in CS
    • DS / Commit just the ones which were migrated into MV – this will join due to our join rules looking for same sAMAccountName.
    • Enable provisioning
    • DS all of them again to make sure MRE rules apply to those objects for any provisioning if required.

Done..

Speed

This has varied for me. It really depends on number of members for the group.. about 3-5 groups / min .. I did about 1500 groups with 90% of them having 0-10 members but the last few having uptoĀ 1100 members in 6.5 hrs.

 

Hopefully this will help someone and see what can be done by Ā combination of various tools out there.

FIMService: Convert Static Group to Dynamic

Following from my previous post on how to create a group with both static members and dynamic filter, I came across a scenario where post migration we have some customers who initially had a group with explicit members but we thought they could be converted to a filter based group which matches the business case.

The script below helps you on doing the same. Again using LithnetRMA for the process.

Warning: Again, many custom attributes logic in FIMService for my environment but again you will get the whole idea. I have left the script as-is and not dumbed it down.

Please read myĀ Groups with Static and Dynamic Members in FIMServiceĀ post to understand the logic I have been applying for Autogen groups and how group and set tie up to each other in FIMService.

LOGIC

  • Asks for existing group name (DisplayName) in FIMService.
  • If found, outputs the number of explicit members found
  • Asks if you want to put a filter on the group and then asks for the XPATH filter (coming soon on how to create XPATH easily)
  • Checks if the filter is valid. If so (the fun part)
    • Outputs the count of users in the new filter
    • Compares the filter users to explicit members and gives a count of
      • New members to be added due to filter (i.e. not found in the explicit members list)
      • Count of common members found between existing explicit members and XPATH
      • Finally gives count of explicit members for the new set to be created (i.e. not found in the new filter).
  • Finally if the user wants to continue after above information
    • Creates a set with “Autogen-GroupName” and set the filter and explicit members to that
    • Modify’s existing group and deletes the current explicit members
    • Converts the existing group to a filter based and sets the objectID of the set created above.
  • Done

Hope it helps.. Please like, share or leave a comment below..