Using the Kibana dashboards

The Kibana DMARC dashboards are a human-friendly way to understand the results from incoming DMARC reports.

There is no separate Kibana export — Kibana 8.x’s saved-object migration handlers accept the OpenSearch Dashboards format directly, so Kibana users import the bundled dashboards/opensearch/opensearch_dashboards.ndjson in Stack Management → Saved Objects → Import. A CI check imports the same file into a Kibana 8.x container on every change so this stays compatible.

Note

The default dashboard is DMARC aggregate reports. To switch between dashboards, click on the Dashboard link on the left side menu of Kibana.

DMARC aggregate reports

As the name suggests, this dashboard is the best place to start reviewing your aggregate DMARC data.

Across the top of the dashboard, three pie charts display the percentage of alignment pass/fail for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Clicking on any chart segment will filter for that value.

Note

Messages should not be considered malicious just because they failed to pass DMARC; especially if you have just started collecting data. It may be a legitimate service that needs SPF and DKIM configured correctly.

Start by filtering the results to only show failed DKIM alignment. While DMARC passes if a message passes SPF or DKIM alignment, only DKIM alignment remains valid when a message is forwarded without changing the from address, which is often caused by a mailbox forwarding rule. This is because DKIM signatures are part of the message headers, whereas SPF relies on SMTP session headers.

Underneath the pie charts. you can see graphs of DMARC passage and message disposition over time.

Under the graphs you will find the most useful data tables on the dashboard. On the left, there is a list of organizations that are sending you DMARC reports. In the center, there is a list of sending servers grouped by the base domain in their reverse DNS. On the right, there is a list of email from domains, sorted by message volume.

By hovering your mouse over a data table value and using the magnifying glass icons, you can filter on our filter out different values. Start by looking at the Message Sources by Reverse DNS table. Find a sender that you recognize, such as an email marketing service, hover over it, and click on the plus (+) magnifying glass icon, to add a filter that only shows results for that sender. Now, look at the Message From Header table to the right. That shows you the domains that a sender is sending as, which might tell you which brand/business is using a particular service. With that information, you can contact them and have them set up DKIM.

Note

If you have a lot of B2C customers, you may see a high volume of emails as your domains coming from consumer email services, such as Google/Gmail and Yahoo! This occurs when customers have mailbox rules in place that forward emails from an old account to a new account, which is why DKIM authentication is so important, as mentioned earlier. Similar patterns may be observed with businesses who send from reverse DNS addressees of parent, subsidiary, and outdated brands.

Further down the dashboard, you can filter by source country or source IP address.

Tables showing SPF and DKIM alignment details are located under the IP address table.

Note

The alignment tables (SPF details, DKIM details) and the per-IP source table live on the same dashboard, further down. To view failures only, use the pie chart at the top of the page as a filter.

Any other filters work the same way. You can also add your own custom temporary filters by clicking on Add Filter at the upper right of the page.

DMARC failure reports

The DMARC failure reports dashboard (formerly DMARC Forensic Samples) contains information on DMARC failure reports (also known as forensic or ruf reports). These reports contain samples of emails that have failed to pass DMARC.

Note

Most recipients do not send forensic/failure/ruf reports at all to avoid privacy leaks. Some recipients (notably Chinese webmail services) will only supply the headers of sample emails. Very few provide the entire email.

SMTP TLS reporting

The SMTP TLS reporting dashboard surfaces aggregate counts of TLS-RPT reporting organizations, the policy domains they report on, and the specific failure types — certificate expiry, STARTTLS not supported, STS policy fetch errors, validation failures, and similar — together with the sending and receiving MTA addresses involved.