XML Schema For MBSA Reports

Question

I'm in the process of creating a script to run the command line version of Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (mbsacli.exe) against all of our servers. Since the MBSA reports are provided as XML documents, I should be able to write a script or small program to parse the XML looking for errors / issues.

I'm wondering if anyone knows whether or not the XML schema for the MBSA reports is documented anywhere -- I have goggled this, and cant seem to find any trace of it. I've run across a few articles that address bits and pieces, but nothing that addresses the complete schema.

Yes, I could just reverse engineer the XML, but I would like to understand a little more about the meaning of some of the tags.

Thanks...

Answer 1

I have been looking for ages for something to effectively parse through multiple MBSA results in a simple and effective manner. I have not necessarily found the MBSA (even the previous version, netchk) XML schema documented anywhere. The MBSA Sample Scrips might be a good resource as it includes XML files and Javascript files used the parse through results. This might be a good springboard for your script.

Personally, I have had good success importing all of the XML files into Excel. This process is mostly manually sorting and is far from perfect, but it's better then parsing everything by hand. I am sure you someone familiar with scripting could make this work like magic.

MBSA itself has not been updated in over two years. Hopefully in the wake of this new era of M$ they will create another product that will provide better functionality for audting multiple servers.