Getting started with Huntress dashboards

If you run Huntress across a fleet of client environments, you already know the console gives you a solid view of agent health, threat detections and incident reports. What it doesn't give you is a way to put that data next to everything else you're tracking, your PSA tickets, your other security tools, the rest of your stack, so you can see the whole client picture in one place.

That's where the SquaredUp Huntress plugin comes in. It connects directly to your Huntress account and brings your agent, organization and incident data into dashboards you can shape however you like. And since most MSPs run Huntress alongside a PSA and a handful of other tools, your Huntress data can sit right next to the rest of that stack when you want the full client picture.

Generating API credentials

Getting started with the Huntress plugin is straightforward. The plugin authenticates using a public and private API key pair, so the first step is to generate one from your Huntress account.

Log in to your Huntress account at https://<your_account_subdomain>.huntress.io, open the dropdown menu at the top right of the header, and select API Credentials. Click Setup (or Create API Credential if you've been here before), then click Generate to create your key pair.

You'll be given a Public Key and a Private Key. Copy the private key straight away, as Huntress only shows it once. The default account-level credential is read-only, which is all the plugin needs to pull your data into SquaredUp.

If you don't already have a SquaredUp account, no problem. Just sign up for our Free Forever tier and you can be dashboarding in a few minutes.

Connecting Huntress to SquaredUp

Back in SquaredUp, add a new data source and select Huntress. Enter the Public Key and Private Key you just generated, then save the configuration. The plugin authenticates and starts querying your agents, organizations and incident reports.

One thing worth knowing upfront: the Huntress API is rate limited to 60 requests per minute on a sliding window. For most accounts this is invisible, but if you're managing thousands of agents or have a lot of incident report history, the initial sync may take a little longer while the plugin paginates within that limit. It'll catch up.

What you get out of the box

As soon as you connect, the plugin ships with a prebuilt Huntress Agents dashboard, so there's no blank canvas to stare at. It leads with a set of headline numbers, Total Agents, Firewall Not Enabled, Defender Unhealthy and Policy Non-Compliant, so you can tell at a glance whether an environment needs attention.

Below that sit three breakdowns: Agents by Platform, Agents by Defender Status and Agents by Firewall Status, each shown as a donut so you can spot an unhealthy minority sitting inside a healthy majority. And rather than stopping at the summary numbers, the dashboard drills straight into the detail with two tables, Firewall Not Enabled and Defender Needs Attention, listing the specific hostnames, operating systems and statuses behind the counts above. No extra clicking required to find out which machine needs the visit.

It's a good starting point for a client-facing security posture view, and everything on it is built from data streams you can reuse to build your own.

Building your own view

If you want to go further than the default dashboard, create a new dashboard and add a tile. Searching the data streams for "Huntress" brings up everything the plugin has to offer, including Agents, Organizations and Incident Reports.

Say you look after a lot of client sites and want a single tile showing every organization with agents currently reporting a Defender or firewall issue. Pull from the Agents stream, filter down to the fields you care about, and group by organization. That's a dashboard tile a technician can act on straight away, built entirely from data that was already sitting in Huntress.

Setting up a monitor

A dashboard tells you what's happening. A monitor tells you when something needs your attention without you having to look. Take the Defender Unhealthy count from the agents dashboard: build a tile from the Agents stream filtered to unhealthy Defender status, enable monitoring on it, and set it to flip into an error state as soon as the count rises above zero.

That tile now carries a live health status, and that status rolls up so you can see it across an entire workspace at a glance. The same approach works well for firewall gaps, policy non-compliance, or a spike in incident reports, all of which map cleanly onto Huntress data streams.

Huntress tells you a lot about the endpoints you're protecting. SquaredUp lets you shape that into the views your team actually needs, from a security posture report for a client to an estate-wide health summary for a manager. It gets more powerful when you pair it with the rest of your stack.

Wrapping up

The Huntress plugin gets you from API keys to a working security dashboard in a few minutes, and the prebuilt view means you don't have to build anything before it starts paying off. From there, it's just a case of layering in the data streams and monitors that match how your team actually works, whether that's a per-client report or a single pane of glass across your whole managed estate.

If you don't already have a SquaredUp account, sign up for our Free Forever tier and get connected today.

Happy dashboarding!