Quick Start ​

This guide walks you from a fresh InfraScout account to a completed assessment with saved findings. You will install one agent, optionally connect your Entra tenant, connect Claude, and run your first assessment — all in under 30 minutes. For deeper coverage of any step, follow the links to the dedicated guides.

TIP

Typical setup time is 15–30 minutes, depending on your network environment and whether you already have an Entra app registration ready.

Step 1 — Install Your First Agent ​

Choose the platform for the host you want to assess and follow the deployment guide for that platform:

Each guide walks you through downloading the agent binary, enrolling it against your InfraScout server, and registering it as a system service. Once the agent is enrolled and running, return here. The agent should appear online in the Agents page of the web portal within a few seconds of enrollment.

Step 2 — Connect Your Entra ID Tenant ​

If you want to assess Microsoft Cloud resources — Entra ID users and roles, Azure subscriptions, Microsoft 365, or Defender — connect your tenant now. If you only want to assess on-premises hosts for this quick start, skip to Step 3.

Follow the Connecting Entra ID guide to create an app registration, grant the required Graph API permissions, and link the tenant to your InfraScout account. When the connection is complete, your tenant appears in Settings → Microsoft Cloud with a "Connected" status.

Step 3 — Connect Claude ​

Configure Claude Desktop with your InfraScout MCP endpoint and API key by following the Connecting Claude guide. That guide covers where to find your API key in the dashboard, how to add the MCP server entry to your Claude Desktop configuration, and how to confirm the tools are loaded.

Verify the connection by asking Claude to run auth_whoami — you should see your InfraScout identity returned in the response. If you see an error instead, the troubleshooting section of the connecting guide covers the most common causes.

Step 4 — Run Your First Assessment ​

With an agent online and Claude connected, you are ready to start assessing. Open a new conversation in Claude Desktop and try the prompts below.

Ask Claude to confirm it can see your enrolled agents:

"List all connected InfraScout agents and show me their operating systems and capabilities."

Start an assessment session on the agent you enrolled and get a system summary:

"Start an assessment session on [your agent hostname] and give me a summary of the system — OS version, hardware, running services, and any obvious configuration issues."

Claude will use the session_start tool to open a session against the agent, run a series of discovery commands, interpret the results, and save any findings as Insights in your InfraScout account.

If you connected an Entra tenant in Step 2, add a Microsoft Cloud query to the same conversation:

"Using my Entra connection, list the users who have Global Administrator role assignments and flag any that don't have MFA registered."

INFO

You can run agent and Microsoft Cloud queries in the same Claude conversation. Claude manages each context independently and combines the findings into a single Insights view.

Step 5 — Review Your Insights ​

Open the web portal and navigate to Insights. Any findings Claude saved during the assessment appear here with their severity level and category. You can update each insight's status as you work through remediation — moving it from open through acknowledged and in_progress to resolved.

See Insights for a full explanation of the severity model and the status workflow.

What's Next ​

Now that you have completed your first assessment, explore the rest of the platform:

  • Web Portal — tour every screen of the portal, from the dashboard to the admin area
  • Agent Groups — organize your growing fleet into logical groups for scoped assessments
  • Playbooks — run structured, repeatable assessments from markdown playbooks
  • Microsoft Cloud Tools — browse the full catalog of Entra ID, Azure, M365, and Defender tools
  • Running Assessments — a deeper walkthrough of sessions, scoping, and scheduling