Installing

Python 3.6 or Later

MSTICPy requires Python 3.6 or later. If you are running in hosted environment such as Azure Notebooks, Python is already installed. Please ensure that the Python 3.6 (or later) kernel is selected for your notebooks.

If you are running the notebooks locally, you will need to install Python 3.6 or later. The Ananconda distribution is a good starting point since it comes with many of packages required by MSTICPy pre-installed.

Creating a virtual environment

Note

This is an optional step. You will most likely want to do this if you are installing MSTICPy in a local Python installation. If you are using a cloud notebook environment such as Azure ML you will usually not need to create a virtual environment.

MSTICPy has a significant number of dependencies. To avoid conflicts with packages in your existing Python environment you may want to create a Python virtual environment or a conda environment and install the package there.

For standard python use the venv command to do this (there are also several alternatives to venv available).

~$ python -m venv my_env
~$ ./my_env/scripts/activate
(my_env) ~$

For Conda use the conda create command from a conda shell.

(base) c:\users\ian> conda create -n my_env
(base) c:\users\ian> conda activate my_env
(my_env) c:\users\ian>

You should see the name of the environment that you’ve just created and activated in the prompt.

Installation

Run the following command to install the base configuation of MSTICPy.

pip install msticpy

or for the latest dev build

pip install git+https://github.com/microsoft/msticpy

Selective Installation - using “extras”

pip supports specification of an additional parameter sequence known as extras. The syntax for this is:

pip install package_name[extra1,extra2,...]

As of version 0.9.0 MSTICPy has its dependencies split into extras. This allows you to install only the packages that you need and avoid the overhead of time and diskspace of dependencies that you do not need.

Note

extras do not affect the which code from MSTICPy is installed - only the external libraries on which certain functions inside MSTICPy need to work.

Warning

the core install no longer includes the Azure libraries and only a limited install of the Kqlmagic package used for most Azure Sentinel data queries. If you are an Azure Sentinel user, you should always install with the “azsentinel” extra.

Extras in MSTICPy

The extras available in MSTICPy are described in the following table:

extra	Functionality	Install time (increment)	Install time (full)
[none]	Most functionality (approx 75%) Kqlmagic Jupyter basic	–	1m:13s
keyvault	Key Vault and keyring storage of settings secrets	5s	1m:18s
azure	Azure API data retrieval (subs, resources, Vms, etc.) Azure storage APIs Azure Sentinel APIs (not data query) Also includes “keyvault”	1m:36s	2m:50s
kql	Azure Sentinel data queries Kqlmagic Jupyter extended	2m:07s	3m:20s
azsentinel	Combination of core install plus “azure”, “keyvault” and “kql”	3m:48s	5m:00s
ml	Timeseries analysis Event clustering Outlier analysis	29s	1m:42s
splunk	Splunk data queries	3s	1m:16s
vt3	VirusTotal V3 graph API (default VT lookup is included in base install)	4s	1m:17s
all	Includes all of above packages	4m:00s	5m:29s
dev	Development tools plus “base”	1m:17s	2m:30s
test	“dev” plus “all”	4m:20s	5m:50s

The installation times here are meant to be indicative of comparative times for installation - they will vary depending on the performance of your computer and network.

The Install time (increment) column shows times relative to the base install (i.e. assuming you’ve already run pip install msticpy). The Install time (full) column shows the time to install the base plus extra. Both columns assume that the following packages are already installed: jupyter, pandas and matplotlib.

If you do not specify an “extra” in your pip install command, the base dependencies for MSTICPy will be installed. This has a lot of functionality such as networking, pivoting, visualization but excludes most dependencies that are specific to a particular data environment like Azure Sentinel or Splunk.

Some of the extras, like “all” and “azsentinel” are combinations of other options collected together as a convenience. You can also specify multiple extras during install, separating them with commas.

pip install msticpy[azure,kql]

Warning

when specifying multiple extras, do not leave spaces between the options - just separate with commas.

Missing “extra” exceptions

If you try to use functionality for a component that needs a dependency that you have not installed you will usually get an informative exception message telling you which “extra” option you need to use to enable that feature.

To fix this simply run pip install with the “extra” option shown in the exception message:

pip install msticpy[ml]

Note

In some cases you many not get an informative error. We’ve tried to trap all of the cases but if experience a problem with some MSTICPy functionality (especially an ImportError exception, make sure that you have installed the extra that corresponds to the functionality you are trying to use.