Cipp Alerts

CIPP Alerts & Audit Logs

CIPP raises alerts based on standards violations, anomaly detection, and configured thresholds. The two tools in this skill let you triage the alert queue and pull underlying audit log evidence.

Anti-triggers

• A CIPP tool is erroring or a background job failed — that is CIPP's own application log, cipp_list_logs, in cipp-ops. It is not cipp_list_audit_logs, which reads the customer tenant's M365 unified audit log.
• An endpoint or SIEM detection — a CIPP alert is a configuration or threshold alert about a tenant, never an EDR finding. Use huntress-incidents, blumira-findings, sentinelone-alerts, or blackpoint-incident-response depending on which product raised it.
• The forensic snapshot for one compromised user — cipp_bec_check is in cipp-users; the audit-log queries here supplement it rather than replace it.
• Why an alert fired at all — the standard that raised it, and its Report/Alert/Remediate mode, live in cipp-standards.

Tools

cipp_list_alert_queue

cipp_list_alert_queue()

Returns queued alerts across all tenants — alert type, tenant, severity, raised time, and current status. This is your daily triage list.

cipp_list_audit_logs

cipp_list_audit_logs(tenantFilter='contoso.onmicrosoft.com',
                     startDate?, endDate?,
                     userId?, operation?)

Tenant-scoped audit log entries from the M365 unified audit log. Filter by date range, user, or operation to narrow investigation scope. Use to investigate suspicious sign-ins, admin role changes, mailbox access, app consent grants, and policy modifications.

Workflow patterns

Daily alert triage

1. cipp_list_alert_queue — pull the full queue
2. Group by tenant + alertType to spot patterns (one tenant generating most alerts often signals a broken standard or runaway script)
3. Triage in severity order: critical → high → medium → low
4. For each alert: drill into the related tenant's audit logs with cipp_list_audit_logs filtered to the alert window

Correlate alert → audit evidence

alerts = cipp_list_alert_queue()
critical = [a for a in alerts if a['severity'] == 'critical']
for a in critical:
    logs = cipp_list_audit_logs(
        tenantFilter=a['tenantId'],
        startDate=a['raisedAt'] - 30 minutes,
        endDate=a['raisedAt'] + 5 minutes,
    )

The 30-minute lookback usually captures the precipitating event (sign-in, admin change, app consent) that caused the alert.

Common audit operations to filter on

Investigating a suspected compromise

When cipp_bec_check flags a user, supplement it with audit log queries:

1. Pull all UserLoggedIn operations for the user over the last 7 days — look for unusual countries, IPs, or bursts of failed → success patterns
2. Pull all New-InboxRule and Set-Mailbox operations — hidden forwarding/auto-delete rules
3. Pull all Consent to application operations — illicit consent grants are common BEC vectors

Caveats

• The unified audit log has a lag (typically minutes, sometimes hours) — recent events may not appear immediately.
• Audit retention varies by license: 90 days for E3, 1 year for E5, longer with audit log retention add-ons. Plan investigations around what the tenant's licensing actually allows.
• cipp_list_alert_queue returns active queue items — historic resolved alerts require the CIPP UI.