Use PolicyPak GP Compliance Reporter’s “Pull / Standalone” mode to request (interrogate) Group Policy Settings from endpoints. With this method, the PPGPCR server is not used. All new PPGPCR customers should start here.

PPGPCR Standalone Quickstart

Hi. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, group policy MVP and founder of PolicyPak software. In this video, we’re going to do a quick start of the group policy compliance reporter when we’re using standalone mode. Standalone mode means there’s no server so you’ll start here. I’ve actually already got it up and running. There are some preliminary questions that it asks you in order to get started and we’ll assume you’ve been through all those and you’re ready to get going. The first thing you need to understand is there’s three panes: the snapshots pane, the test pane, and the results pane. We’re going to walk through all three of these. The idea is that the snapshot pane lets you create a set and a set is basically a group of computers that you want to report upon.

We’ll go ahead and we’ll create a computer set, here. If you called it “All”, for instance – create it as a set called “All” and you clicked the entire domain, that’s totally fine; that set is perfectly valid. That being said, you do need to make sure that all those computers that are listed here within this set are licensed. In my universe here, I do have the entire domain licensed. You might not; you might have, for instance, only your East Sales desktop or something licensed or something like that. I have my entire world licensed. Once you’ve created your set here, and again, it doesn’t have to be all. I’m just using it as an example. You can then right-click and create a snapshot. A snapshot is right now going to query all these machines in real time that are in your domain and try to figure out, Are they on? Are they accepting requests?

What’s the current state of affairs upon them? For instance, who’s logged on? Is Johnny logged on Win763 or something like that? This takes a minute to go through but you might notice you’re going to get some connection errors; some are going to return back “Okay,” and so on and so forth. Now, one of the reasons why you might get a connection error is that the Windows firewall could be on on the target machine or you might have a DNS resolution problem between your machine and the target machine. Let me say that again. If you get a bunch of connection errors, could be a handful of things. Thing number 1, the most common one, is that the firewall is on or the required holes aren’t poked through or thing number 2 is you can’t ping the machine because the firewall is on. Thing 3, that computer isn’t on right now.

The server edition, which we’re not covering in this quick start, conquers the problem of if the computer isn’t on, how do you get the data because in the server edition all the clients are just constantly updating the server. We don’t have to be on at the same time when our target computers are. It’s a big advantage of getting the server edition. Anyway, if you want to see how to configure to open holes through the firewall, I’ve got that in another video. If you’re getting all connection errors everywhere, I’ve got another video that explains how to open up the firewall so that you can get exactly the right ports so that we can talk to the right machines. Now, you can see we’ve got some computers that have responded okay and that’s it. We’ve taken a snapshot in time right now, right for this moment in time.

We’ll go to test and that’s where we can create a test. Maybe what’s important to us is to know that our password length for WinZip is set to 14. Maybe that’s really important and I’ve already got a test there but let’s say I wanted to create a new test from scratch. What I can do is create a new folder here, call it “Important app tests,” and in important app tests I’m going to create a test and I’ll call this “WinZip has 14 characters.” That’s not a great name but you get the general idea. As you can see, a group policy object opens up for us for temporary editing. If you don’t see the PolicyPak node; that means you didn’t install the PolicyPak on premise admin MSI, which gets you the PolicyPak node. Now, it’s not strictly required but if you want to test against PolicyPak things, that’s what you would do. If you wanted to set PolicyPak application manager here, and you went to “new application” and you picked WinZip, here is where you are making a test that you are testing to see if the character minimum password length is 14.

You could put a lot of items in here or a single, individual item. I like to go smaller; I like to have more tests with fewer things in them and give them good names; although, you could argue that the name I gave it wasn’t so great. Okay, once we close that, we can see the configuration of the test in there and you might want to create another test; for instance, let’s create another test called “Win screensaver is forced with a lock.” Okay, so we’ll do that one. That’s under user side policies, admin templates, control panel, personalization, and that would be – there it is. Password protects a screensaver. If this guys is not configured, then oh, users can just walk up to a machine and do whatever they want. Instead, we’re going to make sure that’s enabled. Now, again, we’re not setting these things; we’re creating a test that’s going to test these things.

You can have a battery of possible things you want to test for and here in results we’re going to add them all together. The idea is here you’re going to add a test. Let’s go ahead and pick our – WinZip is 14 characters and when the screensaver is forced with a lock. These two tests are going to be jammed together. This thing here on the right is what’s called your result compliance test. This is the sum total of all the settings that you are declaring you need to have on your computers and your user configurations so you can see really we’re testing user population right now for you to be compliant. If all these things are true, then you get the thumbs up. If any of those things are false, you get a thumbs down. If we select the RSOP source and we were to pick the snapshot that we just created just now, this is our snapshot group, our set, and then this is a snapshot upon that set. Then, we can now generate results.

For a lot of them, we’re going to have no data because we weren’t able to query the machine to actually get there. Oh, we’re doing well on the computer side but on some of the users – we’ve got warnings. In fact, we’re good on all the computer sides but we’ve got warnings on some of the user sides. That makes sense. We actually are not asking the computer for any data to come back; we’re just asking about the stuff on the user side. We can see that West Sales User 1 on Win8 Computer 32 has a warning. Let’s see what the warning is. Uh, He doesn’t have either thing. He doesn’t have the WinZip set to 14 characters and he also doesn’t have the password-protected screensaver on there.

Now, we have to fix that. What we’ll do is we will actually fix that by going to our West Sales users. Okay, here’s West Sales. Let’s actually fix this problem. Let’s create a GPO called “Set WinZip to 14 characters.” Actually, set that one first so we’re fixing the problem now here in real time. If we go to user-side PolicyPak, application manager, and go to “New application WinZip,” let’s actually set this thing the way that the test says that we should to 14 characters. If we want to, in the same group policy object or multiple group policy objects, your call, you can go to policies, admin templates, and set the control panel settings that we were talking about. Under “personalization” we want to password protect the screensaver. We’ve set these two items in this one GPO. It’s linked over to our West Sales users. I think we said that guy was on Win8 Computer 32 so that’s this guy.

Win8 Computer 32. If we were to just wait, group policy would apply or we could run GP update or we could log them off and log him back on. Any of those things is going to cause group policy to download, take effect, and get the latest, greatest settings. Then, we can retest for it. In fact, let’s make sure we got the group policy object we’re looking for. On the computer side, we don’t care. On the user side, that’s where we do care. Yep. “Set WinZip to 14 characters.” Actually, if I were smarter, I would’ve called it and also set the control panels as we need to but I didn’t do that. Next, we need to make another snapshot because remember that snapshot for our “All” group was for that moment in time, it was for 5/17/2015 at 4:53PM. Is that valid right now? Gosh. I don’t know. What we need to do now, is we need to create another snapshot, here. It’s going to query all the machines and all the users and see what’s the story, now.

I have a lot of computers that are not on my network anymore and, hence, they get a connection error. There we go. Alright, so next we’ve already defined our tests. We don’t really have to visit this pane anymore. Let’s just go back to “results” and we can see we’ve already got our selected test locked and loaded. All we need to do now is select RSOP source; pick our latest, greatest snapshot just a couple of minutes later after we think we fixed the problem. Remember the target machine has to have downloaded these latest group policy objects. Then, if we generate results, let’s go ahead and see what happens, now. We go down, down, down, down, down. Look at that. Before we had a warning and now we’re okay and we can see that everything matches in the test.

This is how you would use the group policy compliance standalone reporter in order to quickly attain results to figure out, well, I’ve got a snapshot with various computers in it as I want to. If I click on “tests”, I can create specific tests that I want to figure out – I have this battery of possible things that I want to see if I’m compliant upon or not. Then, you use the results pane to create and order your selected tests and then see if it’s true against your entire set. Little side trick, by the way, is if you click on “snapshots” here, if you click on any set that succeeded, for instance here on Win7 – on Win10 Computer 74 – here you can see that we got some results. If you double click on it, actually, what’s nice is that you’ll get an instant report and you can see that Win7 Computer 74 had this user on it.

This is the actual group policy results report of everything that happened on the machine. If you just want to see what’s going on right now on the machine, very quickly you can do it instantly from this pane right there. I hope that helps you out and gets you quick started with the group policy compliance reporter standalone edition. In order to get set up and running and using all the auditing features of the server edition, well that’s a separate video. Thanks so much for watching. We’ll talk to you soon.