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a plan for accessible, quick, daily XG reports in my inbox (not those awful PDF's)

I've searched high and low for a way to get a one-pager email summary, daily of simple things like IPS event graphs. I WILL NOT settle for logging in to the XG's at different customers daily to check this.

I've always wanted something that is a quick view that I can glance at for a second while going through my emails every day. I'm not talking about an attached PDF, that one I have to open up manually every morning and comb through pages of Titles, Tables of Contents etc. Sometimes those PDF's are even empty on smaller networks because the XG doesn't have a way to block empty reports. The Executive Summary report is the closest thing on-box that I can use, but even then it's limited, is messed up by the horrible table of contents and title page stuff, and I don't always use all the services it lists anyways for customers. I really like the manually downloaded HTML reports, especially customized ones with my 8 favorite metrics, but those can't be scheduled as HTML only PDF.

 

So, here's my plan, let me know if you are interested in the outcome and maybe it will spur me on faster, or tell me if I'm an idiot and there's a better way:

 

1. Normal Daily IPS report (PDF) gets sent to my mailbox (office 365) by XG.

2. Microsoft Flow Free Edition (included in Office 365), or Zapier Free edition would save the PDF attached by the XG to a Dropbox/Onedrive account.

3. A powershell listening script on an always-on PC would take the incoming PDF, and rasterize, or, convert the PDF pages of my choosing into image files. I found a script online, which invokes GhostScript an open source project that can split the pages into jpegs.

4. The powershell script would then generate an email back to me containing the image files (pages) of my choosing, embedded into the email body for easy, quick viewing that doesn't break the bank.

 

The one thing I'd really like to change is to not have to use Flow or Zapier. Having reports go there to such a consumer'ish service makes me uneasy.



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  • For those 5 subscribers interested, I took a little dive into things tonight. Came up with a simpler, and IMO more secure plan. Not saying the above plan would not have worked, but I prefer to keep things a certain way.

     

    1. I signed up for a 14 day trial of gsuite / google apps account. It will be $5 a month after the trial ends. (I think you could also do this with a free gmail.com account, in fact I've used it before on another project, but I'm not sure if the Google Drive API would work with a free account, maybe)

    2. Created a Google Apps script that takes incoming email with specific Tags, extracts the text from the Sophos PDF file, and returns an email back to me with the text inline in the body of the email. 

     

    All that remains to do now is a little more tinkering some night soon to have the original sophos PDF report attached as well, and I am probably going to settle on this for all my scheduled reports. It just gives me a better idea if I should open a specific PDF report that day or not, saving me time.