Managing thousands of machines is a tough job for which many organizations are using Group Policy. If you are familiar with uberAgent you may know that it lists GPOs that are applied during user logon. Computer policies, on the other hand, are not part of uberAgent’s regular feature set. However, that can easily be remedied with the help of uberAgent’s custom script functionality. This article shows how.

Listing Applied Machine Policies

In a nutshell, the uberAgent custom scripts feature executes any script you like and sends the output to Splunk. This works with any scripting engine, of course. In this case, we used PowerShell.

The following script lists all applied machine policies.

# We need a temporary XML file to store the data
$OutputFile = "C:\Windows\Temp\TempGPOExport.xml"

# If the file exists delete it
If (Test-Path $OutputFile)
{
   Remove-Item $OutputFile -Force
}

# Run gpresult and store the result in the temporary xml file
gpresult.exe /Scope Computer /X $OutputFile /F

# Read the xml file
[xml]$XML = Get-Content $OutputFile

# Get the names of all GPOs
$GPOs = ($XML.Rsop.ComputerResults.GPO).Name | Sort-Object

# Remove the temporary file
Remove-Item $OutputFile -Force

# Join all GPOs to a long string
$GPOs = $GPOs -join ';'

# Write the output. uberAgent will pick this up.
Write-Output "MachineGPOs=`"$GPOs`""

Save the script somewhere. For this example, we save the script as C:\Program Files\vast limits\uberAgent\Scripts\Get-MachineGPOs.ps1.

Configure uberAgent to Run the Script

Create a new timer in uberAgent’s configuration. With the settings shown below, the script will be executed once per day.

[Timer]
Name = Get-MachineGPOs
Interval = 86400000
Start delay = 600000
Persist interval = true
Thread priority = background
Script = powershell.exe -executionpolicy bypass -file "C:\Program Files\vast limits\uberAgent\Scripts\Get-MachineGPOs.ps1"
ScriptContext = Session0AsSystem

Splunk it!

Once the data is in Splunk it can be used to document the applied computer GPOs. Run the following search to list all group policy objects per machine.

index = `uberAgent_index` sourcetype = "\"uberAgent:Script:Get-MachineGPOs\"" 
| stats 
   latest(MachineGPOs) as MachineGPOs 
      by host 
| eval MachineGPOs = split(MachineGPOs,";") 
| table
   host
   MachineGPOs

The results from the above search look like this: