Communication Flow and Troubleshooting

The Umbrella integration spans several areas of your Cisco Active Directory (AD) Connector configuration. We recommend that you understand the flow of communication between each of the operational components. This can assist in troubleshooting and in ensuring that your environment is properly configured before you deploy.

Table of Contents

• Communication Flow
• Troubleshooting

Communication Flow

The Cisco AD Connector first attempts to communicate to the domain controller over LDAPS. If unsuccessful, it falls back to communicating over LDAP using Kerberos or NTLM, in that order.

The connector retrieves the AD users, groups, and computer details only. The necessary attributes are stored from each object, including the sAMAccountName, dn, userPrincipalName, memberOf, objectGUID, primaryGroupId (for users, groups and computers), and primaryGroupToken (for groups). Passwords or password hashes are not retrieved. This data is then uploaded to Umbrella for use in policy configuration and reporting. This data is also required for per-user or per-computer filtering. Note that the objectGUID is sent in hashed form.

The connector sends the AD data every 5-7 minutes if there are changes, using an HTTPS connection on port 443 TCP. It can take an hour or longer for changes to reflect on the Umbrella dashboard though.

The connector stores this data locally as well in .ldif files contained within C:\Program Files\Cisco\CiscoADConnector\ADSync. To find out exactly what is being synchronized to Umbrella, you can look at these files. At install time, you have the option to turn off the local storage of .ldif files.

Troubleshooting

The following firewall/ACL requirements ensure that AD Connectors can communicate with the Umbrella cloud services and domain controllers:

Note: The Digicert domains resolve to various IP addresses based on a CDN and are subject to change.

If you experience any issues when communicating with Umbrella, we recommend that you check for any Layer-7 application proxies that might be blocking or dropping some data. A common case is the inspect feature on Cisco devices that act on protocols such as DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/asa/asa72/configuration/guide/conf_gd/inspect.html

You can restart the connector by restarting the Cisco AD Connector service on the connector system. Restarting the connector triggers a full synchronization of AD objects (and not just the changes from the previous sync) to Umbrella.

If your connector is not in the Okay state and you need to raise a support ticket with Umbrella, see Providing Support with AD Connector Logs.

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Change the Connector Account Password < Communication Flow and Troubleshooting > Provision Identities Through Manual Import