Visualizing DMARC report using SES and QuickSight

Domain owners who monitor DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) reports have better success with email deliverability because they can ensure all messages conform to authentication best practices. Using the approach suggested here, it is now possible to visualize DMARC retrieving reports discussed in this blog.

Configure DNS records according to this blog so that periodic DMARC report will be sent to an email address configured existing in your SES email identities.

If you want to enrich the data with DMARC monitoring, you will need the following.

Setup Email Receiving in the SES console. Follow this instruction to configure email receipt rule set and rules. Set the S3 bucket to be the template created ses-dmarc-email-received-[account ID] bucket.

Here is the AWS Lambda function (Github link) which is triggered by each email with DMARC report as an attachment.

Configure read and write permission for S3 buckets which are configured in Environment variables.

Once the reports are processes, there should be JSON objects in the destination bucket.

First, create a database in AWS Glue. Then, access Amazon Athena to create two tables and three views. We will only use the final combined view for visualization. The reason for multiple tables and views is to handle different JSON structures in DMARC report.

The following three queries will create views.

In Amazon QuickSight, datasets with Athena data source are added and a visualization can be created. If your organization uses AWS Lake Formation, you will need to provide find-grained permission from Amazon QuickSight to tables and views in Athena.

In addition, you can utilize various QuickSight features, such as data join from multiple datasets, non-console access, periodic email delivery of reports, granular permission with row-level security, to meet your business reporting needs.

In this post, I showed you how to build SES deliverability reports from external DMARC data using Amazon QuickSight. The solution will allow you to share reports to users without AWS console access. You can customize graphs and tables in Amazon QuickSight dashboard in order to meet your business requirements