The Group Policy Management Console XML and HTML reports missing information due to limitations in the GPMC

The Group Policy Management console (GPMC) in Active Directory has a nice feature which allows you to generate reports in HTML and XML format of the settings in the Group Policy Object.



The report is actually generated by the GPMC itself rather than the domain controller the tool is running against. This is somewhat problematic due to possible version differences between the tool and the Group Policy object settings.

Also the report only contains as much information as the tool can interpret - whilst the coverage is generally very good Microsoft seem to have become complacent in later versions of Windows where new settings have been added to Group Policy but the GPMC has not been updated to convert these into the settings in the HTML and XML reports. 

This is actually highlighted in the Windows Defender Firewall section where you may see the following:

This rule might contain some elements that cannot be interpreted by the current version of GPMC reporting module


Group Policy stores information in a variety of places including a binary registry.pol file, XML files (for Group Policy preferences), .ini files. It's a bit of a mess. The GPMC reports aggregate all of this information into a single report.


For the Windows Defender Firewall the rules are actually stored in the Registry.pol file. You can view this file with the Get-GPRegistryValue cmdlet or there is a nice GUI tool available here.

https://sdmsoftware.com/general-stuff/registry-policy-viewer-1-5/

You can see that the Windows Defender Firewall rule is actually stored in Group Policy as a String delimited by the | character and the GPMC just ignores the parameters it hasn't been coded to interpret.


The items that aren't interpreted by even the latest GPMC on Windows Server 2022 include the following:

  • Rule application packages
  • Rule compartments
  • Edge Traversal > Defer to user
  • Edge Traversal > Defer to application
  • Local Principals Tab
  • Allow the computers to dynamically negotiate encryption
  • IP Sec integrity algorithms aren’t all supported
  • Key Exchange Algorithms aren’t all supported – Diffe-Hellman Group 24 defaults to a different key exchange.
  • Most of the identity algorithms are  not supported.
  • Many of the newer encryption algorithms are not supported.
  • The advanced settings of the authentication method are not displayed at all.


 While you're here -
Why not check out our Group Policy Audit and Documentation Tool?



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