If you are not using Windows authentication, your Enterprise Alert username and password are your key to enter the Enterprise Alert Web portal as well as the mobile app.
Passwords can be more or less complex and Enterprise Alert allows you to define the required password complexity. This means that by default a password containing at least six characters with one uppercase, one lowercase and one numeric character is required when a new user is created or the password of an existing user is modified.
There are essentially four settings in the “KeyValueCollections” table of the “EnterpriseAlert” database that govern the behavior of the password policy, namely “PWComplexityRuleActivated”, “PWComplexityRuleRegex”, “PWComplexityRuleUserDescriptionKeyand” and “PWComplexityRuleUserDescriptionTooltipKey”. A description of these settings is provided below:
Setting | Description |
PWComplexityRuleActivated | Whether or not the password policy is active or not. Set 1 for active and 0 to disable the functionality. |
PWComplexityRuleRegex | The regular expression that enforces the password policy Please refer to resources in the Internet for more information about regular expressions. |
PWComplexityRuleUserDescriptionKey | The text that is displayed if the entered password does not comply with the regular expression specified forPWComplexityRuleRegex. |
PWComplexityRuleUserDescriptionTooltipKey | The tooltip that is displayed if the user moves their mouse of the “Password Profile” or “Confirm Password Profile” fields on the user details page |
Activating or deactivating the Policy
- Open SQL Server Management Studio and log onto the SQL Server instance where the Enterprise Alert database “EnterpriseAlert” has been installed.
- Select “New Query” and select the “EnterpriseAlert” database.
- Execute the following query if you would like to enable the password policy:— Enable Password PolicyUPDATE KeyValueCollectionSET Value = ‘1’WHERE Component = ‘MMEA’ AND [Key] = ‘PWComplexityRuleActivated’OR execute the following query to disable the password policy:— Disable Password PolicyUPDATE KeyValueCollectionSET Value = ‘0’WHERE Component = ‘MMEA’ AND [Key] = ‘PWComplexityRuleActivated’
- Restart Internet Information Services (IIS) by doing an iisreset in the commant prompt
Customizing the Complexity Policy
If you would like to customize the password policy, you can do so by modifying the “PWComplexityRuleRegex”, “PWComplexityRuleUserDescriptionKey” and “PWComplexityRuleUserDescriptionTooltipKey” settings.
The regular expression can for example be changed to ^(?=.*d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,255}$ to ensure that only passwords with a minimum length of eight characters can be entered. To apply this regular expression, execute the following query:
Once you completed your changes, restart IIS (iisreset) for the changes to take effect.