A customer wanted to know how many hours on average their devices were being used, without modifying their configuration.
This to help target replacements, upgrades, #desks per location, #shared devices per location etc.
At first I figured it’d be a simple task, just getting the right event ID’s from the local eventlog, but no, that required additional auditing to be enabled and how would the data flow to PowerBI?
The next attempted data source was much better; Defender Advanced Hunting. Especially the DeviceLogonEvents table, which contains cached and interactive logons to all monitored devices.
Using logon events, we can get an idea of a device’s relative use in the fleet. It won’t be exact as measuring the time between pure lock/unlock/signin/signout events.
This was fine for the customer’s purpose and checking their data the number of daily logon events (7-9) was actually much higher than the expected 2-3 per device per day (at least on Windows 11, our target OS).
Getting that data into PowerBI turned out to be even easier 🙂
Option 1: use my PowerBI template
Option 2: build your own report using below steps:
- Open up PowerBI and click Blank Query
- Open the Advanced Editor
- Paste the KQL query and click done
KQL:
let
AdvancedHuntingQuery = "DeviceLogonEvents
| where Timestamp between (ago(28d) .. now())
| where ActionType == ""LogonSuccess""
| where LogonType == ""Interactive""
| extend LogonDate = startofday(Timestamp)
| where LogonDate < startofday(now())
| summarize
FirstLogon = min(Timestamp),
LastLogon = max(Timestamp)
by DeviceName, LogonDate
| extend UsageDuration = LastLogon - FirstLogon
| project DeviceName, LogonDate, FirstLogon, LastLogon, UsageDuration
| order by DeviceName asc, LogonDate desc",
HuntingUrl = "https://api.security.microsoft.com/api/advancedqueries",
Response = Json.Document(Web.Contents(HuntingUrl, [Query=[key=AdvancedHuntingQuery]])),
TypeMap = #table(
{ "Type", "PowerBiType" },
{
{ "Double", Double.Type },
{ "Int64", Int64.Type },
{ "Int32", Int32.Type },
{ "Int16", Int16.Type },
{ "UInt64", Number.Type },
{ "UInt32", Number.Type },
{ "UInt16", Number.Type },
{ "Byte", Byte.Type },
{ "Single", Single.Type },
{ "Decimal", Decimal.Type },
{ "TimeSpan", Duration.Type },
{ "DateTime", DateTimeZone.Type },
{ "String", Text.Type },
{ "Boolean", Logical.Type },
{ "SByte", Logical.Type },
{ "Guid", Text.Type }
}),
Schema = Table.FromRecords(Response[Schema]),
TypedSchema = Table.Join(Table.SelectColumns(Schema, {"Name", "Type"}), {"Type"}, TypeMap , {"Type"}),
Results = Response[Results],
Rows = Table.FromRecords(Results, Schema[Name]),
Table = Table.TransformColumnTypes(Rows, Table.ToList(TypedSchema, (c) => {c{0}, c{2}}))
in Table
- Edit your credentials and sign in
Now you’ve got the data connected, and just need to create a table with the fields you want.
