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Sharing Microsoft Sentinel Workbook Data with Someone Outside the SIEM

Rod_Trent's avatar
Rod_Trent
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Aug 31, 2020

Hi, all! Rod Trent here. I am a Cybersecurity CE/Consultant at Microsoft and working with Microsoft Sentinel. I also blog for our Secure Infrastructure Blog and have quite a few Microsoft Sentinel articles posted there already. 

 

Customers ask quite often how they can share their Workbooks with others outside of Microsoft Sentinel, i.e., give access to the valuable visualizations/reports to those that don't need full Microsoft Sentinel access. 

 

The solution is actually much easier than it might seem and involves a very simple method of using the pinning features of Workbooks and setting appropriate RBAC rights. 

 

The most important piece is ensuring that the proper, least privilege rights are in place to enable viewing of the Workbook data on the Azure Dashboard. But, before digging into that, read my recent walkthrough for properly Pinning Entire Azure Sentinel Workbooks to Azure Dashboards. 

 

After understanding how best to promote the Workbook data to an Azure Dashboard, now you just need to set the proper access rights. 

 

When you follow the instructions listed above, part of the pinning process is saving the dashboard to a resource group. By default, the resource group is dashboards, as shown in the next image. 

 

The dashboards resource group (or whatever you rename it to) needs to have Reader role assignment in place for the individual or individuals that need access to the specific Dashboard. As shown below, I have an Azure Active Directory group called AzureSentinelDashboards with the Reader role on the dashboards resource group. As a best practice, you should always assign groups versus individual role assignments. The user I want to give Dashboard access to, Andre Rene Roussimoff, is a member of the AzureSentinelDashboards group. This gives Andre proper access to the dashboard but doesn't yet give him access to the Azure Sentinel data. To do that, I have to also assign proper Log Analytics workspace access.  

 

 

After the dashboards role has been assigned, I now need to assign access to the Log Analytics workspace for Azure Sentinel. This ensures that the user or users can view the data in addition to having access to the Azure Sentinel Workbook that has been pinned as a shared Azure Dashboard. 

 

In the Access control for the Azure Sentinel Log Analytics workspace, I assign the AzureSentinelDashboards group as a Reader of the resource. 

 

 

As shown in the next image, Andre now has access to the dashboard and also the Azure Sentinel Workbook data. 

 

 

Summary 

 

Keep in mind, though -- this is simply Reader access. If Andre tries to click on any of the Workbook's dynamic components, he'll get an error message. But, still...this gives Microsoft Sentinel analysts a quick and easy way to make Workbooks and reporting data available to those that shouldn't have full access to the Microsoft Sentinel console. 

 

P.S. If you've been following along, I hope you've picked up that there's a TV theme to my personal Microsoft Sentinel demo site. Any guess how Andre Rene Roussimoff plays into that TV theme?  

 

* Check out my other blog for more Azure Sentinel content: Rod Trent at the Secure Infrastructure Blog

 

* Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rodtrent

Updated Apr 11, 2022
Version 5.0

2 Comments

  • mandeepdhillon's avatar
    mandeepdhillon
    Copper Contributor

    This implementation does not take into account least privilege principles. There are use cases when you create a workbook and are only wanting to share that workbook without granting the user access to all the data in the workspace. The workspace will likely have a lot of Security data, access to which should only assigned based on the role.
    Assigning reader access to whole workspace should not really be required when you only want to grant the given user access to a single workbook. It should work with granting them reader access for the specific underlying tables that make up the visualizations in the workbook. I have tried to see if this worked and it does not. I am also using functions within the workspace to parse the tables from which data is sourced. I was told by Microsoft support that since I am using a function, and the user does not have access to the function, they are not able to see the data in the workbook. This implementation makes little sense from least privilege principles.

  • Jonas's avatar
    Jonas
    Copper Contributor

    There is no way to simply sharing a workbook?

    How can I add to a group somebody outside my (personal) organization/suscription?

     

    regards