Exporting SEPM Firewall Policies in an Editable Format

Products

• Endpoint Protection

Issue/Introduction

Users need to export group-associated firewall policies from the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) into a readable/editable file for an audit.

Environment

Release : 14.3 RU3

Component : Firewall.

Cause

While SEPM's API access and the export option for firewall rules permits the conversion of the .dat file into raw XML, no internal option exists for exporting such rules or policies into a comma separated (CSV) file format for performing the audit in question.

 

Resolution

Users can export individual firewall rules by highlighting all the rules of a policy with CTL-A, right-clicking, and selecting the export option.

Alternatively, users can export the entire policy from a right-click of the policy itself. The export will appear in the .dat file format.

Using a tool like 7zip can allow users to extract the contents of the .dat file into raw XML. 

 

Users can then compose a script to convert the XML into CSV. Otherwise, Microsoft Office Excel provides an import option under the optional Developer tab that will import the raw XML (do not modify the original XML or it will not work) into a workable and editable CSV format.

The following link contains information for accessing the Developer tab in Excel:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/show-the-developer-tab-e1192344-5e56-4d45-931b-e5fd9bea2d45

The following link describes how to import XML into Excel using the Developer tab:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/import-xml-data-6eca3906-d6c9-4f0d-b911-c736da817fa4