New Year – New Official Azure Sentinel PowerShell Module!

Happy New Year everyone!

With the new year comes a new Azure Sentinel PowerShell module!

Based on the Azure SDK for .NET and part of the Azure (Az) module, we are announcing the public preview release of the Az.SecurityInsights PowerShell module.

Because this is an official supported PowerShell module when we release it, the cmdlets are based on the Generally Available (GA) 2020-01-01 SecurityInsights API. As soon as features hit GA, we will update the Az.SecurityInsights module to reflect that.

How to download and test

Prerequisites: the Az.SecurityInsights module requires at a minimum PowerShell version 5.1 and relies on Az.Accounts for Azure authentication.

You can download the Az.SecurityInsights PowerShell module from the PowerShellGallery and install it by using the PowerShell command:

Install-Module -Name Az.SecurityInsights -AllowClobber

The available cmdlets can be explored by using Get-Command -Module Az.SecurityInsights

The Az.SecurityInsights module supports the most common use cases, like interacting with incidents to change status, severity, owner, etc. But also, to add comments and labels to incidents and creating bookmarks.

Although using ARM templates is the preferred way for your CI/CD pipeline, the Az.SecurityInsights module can be very useful for post deployment tasks and is specifically targeted to Security Operations Center (SOC) automation tasks. These tasks can vary from configuring data connectors, creating analytics rules, adding automation actions to analytics rules, etc.

Managing Incidents

Using the Az.SecurityInsights module is straightforward and is parameter driven as most of the PowerShell modules. The common parameters are your Azure Sentinel workspace and resource group name. You can retrieve all your incidents using Get-AzSentinelIncident -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -WorkspaceName $workspaceName or retrieve a specific incident by adding the parameter -IncidentId <yourIncidentId>

Note: the IncidentId is derived from the Name field as depicted below:

Assign an Incident Owner

Most of the cmdlets accept a string as a parameter, but some cmdlets require an input object. For example, to assign an owner to an incident you would first need to create the owner object.

The owner object requires the following mandatory object parameters:

• AssignedTo – the owner full name


• Email – the email address of the owner


• ObjectId – the Azure Active Directory objectId of the owner


• UserPrincipalName – the user principal name of the owner

There are a couple of ways to create an owner object, for example:

After you have created the owner object, you can then pass it as a parameter to the cmdlet Update-AzSentinelIncident like this:

Closing an incident

In case you need to close an incident, you need to make sure that you are passing the valid closing classifications and classification reasons.

Valid closing incident classifications are:

• Undetermined


• TruePositive


• BenignPositive


• FalsePositive

Valid closing classification reasons are:

• SuspiciousActivity


• SuspiciousButExpected


• IncorrectAlertLogic


• InaccurateData

Example closing an incident:

Configuring data connectors

The cmdlet New-AzSentinelDataConnector supports configuring and enabling Azure Sentinel data connectors. The current supported GA data connectors are:

The following example configures the Office 365 data connector:

Some data connectors require more information, like the Azure Security Center data connector:

Exporting and importing analytics rules

The most common asked question that we get is how to export analytics rules and import those in another Azure Sentinel environment. This use case is specifically valid in a Dev-Test scenario where you want to have automation support to import your created analytics rules into production. To export your analytics rules you can leverage the Get-AzSentinelAlertRule cmdlet.

A sample script how to export rules can be downloaded from here

This will export your analytics rules into a folder as one single JSON formatted file.

You can then edit the analytics rules or just import those into another Azure Sentinel environment. A sample will be posted soon.

Happy automating!