A while back I wrote about the ORCA ( ) script and explored how to download, run and use the script to create useful reports on an Office 365 tenant’s configuration. Recently Microsoft added a button to the Security and Compliance Center which does an evaluation similar to that of the ORCA script. We can find that button under Threat Management –> Policy:
How to run the analyzer?
Simple. Click on Configuration Analyzer and an analysis of your tenant will be performed, like so:
Couple notes the be made on this screenshot:
First, we see a ‘View Strict Recommendations’, which seems to imply that we are seeing the ‘Standard Recommendations’.
Which turns out to be true, because if we click on this, we see this change to ‘View Standard Recommendations’:
If we expand a category, we see recommendations that are available:
If we review the recommendations, we see that there are columns for the current configuration as well as the recommended configuration. For the first line, Allowed Senders, if we click on Modify we see the two offending entries:
What else do we get Bob?
Well if we look at The ‘Configuration drift analysis and history’ tab at the top, we see how our configuration analysis has progressed over time:
Also, we can deep dive as far back as three months if we wish to explore that far. This page provides a good audit trail for your configuration and may even aid in troubleshooting an issue if a change was found on a particular date.
What is notably different between this and ORCA is that ORCA provides more background information on the issues that are found. For example, on the ‘Enable end user spam notifications, we see these block of articles to read as well as the link to the config page for AntiSpam settings:
The Config Analyzer does not provide the knowledge links. Now, ORCA also has a flaw in that it does not show to changes that need to be made as does the Config Analyzer.
Overall they compliment each other and are geared towards different groups of people as one is GUI based and the other is driven via PowerShell.
