Deployment Best Practices

Deployment Best Practices #

Overview #

The User Sync tool is designed to run with limited or no human interaction, once it is properly configured. You can use a scheduler in your environment to run the tool with whatever frequency you need.

  • The first few executions of the User Sync Tool can take a long time, depending on how many users need to be added into the Adobe Admin Console. We recommend that you run these initial executions manually, before setting it up to run as a scheduled task, in order to avoid having multiple instances running.
  • Subsequent executions are typically faster, as they only need to update user data as needed. The frequency with which you choose to execute User Sync depends on how often your enterprise directory changes, and how quickly you want the changes to show up on the Adobe side.
  • Running User Sync more often than once every 2 hours is not recommended.

Security Recommendations #

Given the nature of the data in the configuration and log files, a server should be dedicated for this task and locked down with industry best practices. It is recommended that a server that sits behind the enterprise firewall be provisioned for this application. Only privileged users should be able to connect to this machine. A system service account with restricted privileges should be created that is specifically intended for running the application and writing log files to the system.

The application makes GET and POST requests of the User Management API against a HTTPS endpoint. It constructs JSON data to represent the changes that need to be written to the Admin console, and attaches the data in the body of a POST request to the User Management API.

To protect the availability of the Adobe back-end user identity systems, the User Management API imposes limits on client access to the data. Limits apply to the number of calls that an individual client can make within a time interval, and global limits apply to access by all clients within the time period. The User Sync tool implements back off and retry logic to prevent the script from continuously hitting the User Management API when it reaches the rate limit. It is normal to see messages in the console indicating that the script has paused for a short amount of time before trying to execute again.

Starting in User Sync 2.1, there are two additional techniques available for protecting credentials. The first uses the operating system credential store to store individual configuration credential values. The second uses a mechanism you must provide to securely store the entire configuration file for umapi and/or ldap which includes all the credentials required. These are detailed in the next two sections.

Scheduling Recommendations #

The User Sync Tool is designed to run with limited to no human interaction and can leverage a scheduler feature to run the tool. Our recommendation is to run the tool no more than once every 2 hours.

To further prevent customers from experiencing degraded performance, Adobe will add sync controls to the scheduling feature in February 2021. The new controls will prevent the start of a new session if the system is still running a previous sync from a User Sync Tool integration, resulting in a delayed start time of the subsequent sync call.

To learn more, please visit our User Management API Documentation.

Scheduled Task Examples #

You can use a scheduler provided by your operating system to run the User Sync tool periodically, as required by your enterprise. These examples illustrate how you might configure the Unix and Windows schedulers.

You may want to set up a command file that runs UserSync with specific parameters and then extracts a log summary and emails it to those responsible for monitoring the sync process. These examples work best with console log level set to INFO

logging:
  console_log_level: info

Run with log analysis in Windows #

The following example shows how to set up a batch file run_sync.bat in Windows.

C:\\...\\user-sync.exe --users file users-file.csv --process-groups | findstr /I "WARNING ERROR CRITICAL ---- ==== Number" > temp.file.txt
rem email the contents of temp.file.txt to the user sync administration
sendmail -s “Adobe User Sync Report for today” UserSyncAdmins@example.com < temp.file.txt

NOTE: Although we show use of sendmail in this example, there is no standard email command-line tool in Windows. Several are available commercially.

Run with log analysis on Unix platforms #

The following example shows how to set up a shell file run_sync.sh on Linux or Mac OS X:

user-sync --users file users-file.csv --process-groups | grep "CRITICAL\|WARNING\|ERROR\|=====\|-----\|number of\|Number of" | mail -s “Adobe User Sync Report for `date +%F-%a`” UserSyncAdmins@example.com

Schedule a Sync #

Cron #

This entry in the Unix crontab will run the User Sync tool at 4 AM each day:

0 4 * * * /path/to/run_sync.sh

Cron can also be setup to email results to a specified user or mailing list. Check the documentation on cron for your system for more details.

Windows Task Scheduler #

This command uses the Windows task scheduler to run the User Sync tool every day starting at 4:00 PM:

schtasks /create /tn "Adobe User Sync" /tr C:\path\to\run_sync.bat /sc DAILY /st 16:00

Check the documentation on the windows task scheduler (help schtasks) for more details.

There is also a GUI for managing windows scheduled tasks. You can find the Task Scheduler in the Windows administrative control panel.

Log File Rotation #

The default name of the log file produced by each run of User Sync changes on a daily basis, which provides a sort of “poor man’s log file rotation” where all prior days are saved uncompressed in the same directory. Should you wish to use a log file rotation utility, you will probably want to fix the name of the log produced, so that your utility can monitor the size of the log and do rotation on its own schedule. In order to do this, just define the log_file_name_format so that it has the desired string value, without any formatting directives. For example, if you wanted to have the log named “user-sync.log” in all cases, you would put this setting in your configuration file.

logging:
  log_file_name_format: "user-sync.log"

Disabling SSL Verification #

In environments where SSL inspection is enforced at the firewall, the https requests can encounter an error similar to the following:

CRITICAL main - UMAPI connection to org id 'someUUIDvalue@AdobeOrg' failed: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED]

This is because the requests module is not aware of the middle-man certificate required for SSL inspection. The recommended solution to this problem is to specify a path to the certificate bundle using the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable (see https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/kb/UMAPI-UST.html for details). However, in some cases following these steps does not solve the problem. The next logical step is to disable SSL inspection on the firewall. If, however, this is not permitted, you may work around the issue by disabling SSL verification for user-sync.

Disabling the verification is unsafe, and leaves requests vulnerable to middle man attacks, so it is recommended to avoid disabling it if at all possible. The umapi client only ever targets secure Adobe URL’s. In addition, since this option is only recommended for use in a secure network environment, any potential risk is further mitigated.

To bypass the ssl verification, update the user-sync-config.yml as follows:

invocation_defaults:
  ssl_cert_verify: False

During the calls, you may also see a warning from requests:

“InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made to host ‘usermanagement.adobe.io’. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised. See: https://urllib3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced-usage.html#ssl-warnings InsecureRequestWarning”

Previous: Security | Next: Before You Start