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Authentication prompts analysis workbook

  • Article

As an IT Pro, you want the right information about authentication prompts in your environment so that you can detect unexpected prompts and investigate further. Providing you with this type of information is the goal of the authentication prompts analysis workbook.

This article provides you with an overview of this workbook.

Description

Workbook category

Have you recently heard of complaints from your users about getting too many authentication prompts?

Overprompting users can affect your user's productivity and often leads users getting phished for MFA. To be clear, MFA is essential! We are not talking about if you should require MFA but how frequently you should prompt your users.

Typically, this scenario is caused by:

  • Misconfigured applications
  • Over aggressive prompts policies
  • Cyber-attacks

The authentication prompts analysis workbook identifies various types of authentication prompts. The types are based on different pivots including users, applications, operating system, processes and more.

You can use this workbook in the following scenarios:

  • You received aggregated feedback of too many prompts.
  • To detect over prompting attributed to one specific authentication method, policy application, or device.
  • To view authentication prompt counts of high-profile users.
  • To track legacy TLS and other authentication process details.

Sections

This workbook breaks down authentication prompts by:

  • Method
  • Device state
  • Application
  • User
  • Status
  • Operating System
  • Process detail
  • Policy

Authentication prompts by authentication method

In many environments, the most used apps are business productivity apps. Anything that isn’t expected should be investigated. The charts below show authentication prompts by application.

Authentication prompts by application

The prompts by application list view shows additional information such as timestamps, and request IDs that help with investigations.

Additionally, you get a summary of the average and median prompts count for your tenant.

Prompts by application

This workbook also helps track impactful ways to improve your users’ experience and reduce prompts and the relative percentage.

Recommendations for reducing prompts

Filters

Take advantage of the filters for more granular views of the data:

Filter

Filtering for a specific user that has many authentication requests or only showing applications with sign-in failures can also lead to interesting findings to continue to remediate.

Best practices

If data isn't showing up or seems to be showing up incorrectly, confirm that you have set the Log Analytics Workspace and Subscriptions on the proper resources.

Set workspace and subscriptions

If the visuals are taking too much time to load, try reducing the Time filter to 24 hours or less.

Set filter

Next steps