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On the Yahoo Kaseya groups last week somebody posted a question about changing passwords and creating admin accounts over a large number of servers in different machine groups.

In this post I’ll show you how to create a custom Kaseya view to show only Domain Controllers for a machine group.

How to “create a new account” using Kaseya

You can quite easily create new server administrator accounts in Kaseya using the “Reset Password” function under the Remote Control tab. To do this, open the Reset Password section, enter the username of the new account you want to create and ticket the checkboxes for “Create New Account” and “as Administrator” as shown below.

There’s no big secret in this function and I’m surprised at the amount of times people ask about resetting and changing passwords using Kaseya on the Kaseya forums. This function works great for standalone PCs or servers that don’t belong to a domain – you can change the admin passwords for a whole bunch of systems you manage in one hit with a couple of clicks. This is an excellent time saver when there’s been a few staff shuffles and you need to change passwords for a number of client sites at once.

Where this feature falls down is when you have a large number of clients or systems to manage that are on a domain – you don’t want to go around creating admin accounts on member servers, you only want to do this on domain controllers.

The Agent Status screen is one of the most under-appreciated functions in Kaseya

Kaseya has no in-built view or function to show domain controllers only so you need to build a custom view to do this. What many experienced Kaseya admins don’t know is that Kaseya already has an inbuilt way of differentiating DCs from regular member servers that you can very easily use to create a new view.

I discovered this while playing around with one of my favorite and probably one of the most under-used and under-appreciated functions of Kaseya, the Agent Status screen. I really love this function because I can show the detailed data I want for a bunch of machines and filter the results how I want very similarly to how a custom view works. This function is under the Agent tab and is the first at the top.

If you hit the “Select Columns” button under this section, you can customise how this screen looks and what fields it shows:

Telling the difference between Workgroup machines, Domain Machines & Domain Controllers

If you select MachineID & the DOMAIN/WORKGROUP fields in the Select Columns popup, you’ll get a list of PCs as well as the domain or workgroup they belong to. What you’ll notice here is that for machines that belong to a workgroup, Kaseya will show the workgroup name and in brackets next to it you’ll see a W, for domain members, you’ll see (D) and for domain controllers, you’ll see (DC).

Check out my dodgy screenshot example below to see what I mean…names have been smudged to protect the innocent!

Custom view for Domain Controllers only…

Now that we know how Kaseya differentiates DCs between regular servers, it’s easy to create a custom view showing only domain controllers.

To do this:

1. Change to a blank view, so the Select View drop down box says no view, then click Edit:
   
2. From here, the View Definitions popup window will appear and you can create a new view. In the Edit Title box, enter the title as Domain Controllers. Then at the bottom of the window, click the Define Filter button:
   
3. From there, the Filter Aggregate Table popup window will appear and you need to enter in the domain/workgroup field the text below, and yes, keep the asterisks!:Enter *(dc)* in this field.
   
4. Then all you need to do is hit Apply and then Save your view. If you’re a master admin in your Kaseya system, its worth hitting the share button and making your new view public to all your Kaseya admins.

Then all you need to do from now on when you need to see domain controllers for a group or all machine groups is to select the Domain Controllers view, simple as that!

Oh, BTW don’t forget to actually tell your Kaseya admins you’ve created this view.

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