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What's New

This page tracks the most recent product-level changes that matter to users of DataGen.

v0.8.4​

This patch release focuses on target-state policy modeling and more useful walkthroughs for turning generated data into actual lab environments.

Highlights​

  • Source and target environment roles Identity stores, OUs, containers, policies, policy settings, and policy target links now carry environment-role metadata so normalized exports can distinguish current-source evidence from modeled target-state controls.
  • Target Active Directory and GPO slice Generated worlds now include a modeled target AD/GPO slice with workstation, server, and privileged-access baselines. This gives downstream policy-parity, migration-planning, and validation workflows a concrete target surface to compare against.
  • Stronger policy export parity Normalized exports now include environment-role fields for the affected identity and policy artifacts, and registry-backed policy settings receive a stable policy-path fallback when no explicit path is present.
  • True walkthrough depth The AD, Entra, and hybrid walkthroughs now continue beyond DataGen export into native PowerShell or Microsoft Graph population patterns, validation checks, cleanup guidance, and repeatable lab refresh workflows.

v0.8.3​

This patch release tightens Active Directory realism and gives lab-population workflows explicit control over generated environment defaults.

Highlights​

  • Optional AD defaults Scenarios can now set identity.includeEnvironmentDefaults to include or omit generated default containers, built-in groups, default accounts, and tenant/default sync objects. AD lab examples disable those defaults so generated create-lists do not collide with an existing domain.
  • More realistic directory shape Generated hybrid AD environments now include multiple top-level OUs, default containers such as CN=Users and CN=Builtin, built-in administrative groups, default accounts, Domain Controllers OU placement, and Entra Connect sync evidence when defaults are enabled.
  • Cleaner password-expiration signals User-focused accounts no longer default to PasswordNeverExpires; that signal is reserved for more intentional deviations such as service, shared mailbox, machine, and selected privileged account patterns.
  • Duckburg freeze refresh The Duckburg ingestion freeze was regenerated from the updated generator output and verified against the deterministic Duckburg scenario.

v0.8.2​

This patch release focuses on stronger Active Directory realism, especially around where OU placement belongs and how delegated administration shows up in the generated directory.

Highlights​

  • Correct endpoint vs directory-object separation Physical workstations and servers no longer carry direct OU placement metadata. OU residency now remains on the corresponding directory accounts, while the endpoint objects themselves stay anchored to location and machine-account relationships.
  • Location-aware OU population Hybrid user and machine accounts are now placed into the intended location-specific OU branches, so city and branch OUs actually contain realistic directory objects instead of reading like mostly empty scaffolding.
  • Broader AD delegation evidence Generated environments now include a richer delegated-administration ACL surface across workstation, server, user, group, service-account, and administrative OUs, which makes downstream directory and control-plane analysis more believable.

v0.8.1​

This release focuses on repository realism cleanup for collaboration-heavy enterprises, especially around what should and should not count as a true file share.

Highlights​

  • Realistic hidden-root share modeling User homes and profile paths are no longer exported as one top-level share per employee. DataGen now models a small number of real hidden roots such as users$ and profiles$, which is much closer to how modern environments are actually run.
  • Limited owner-specific exceptions The generator still emits a small number of direct-owner restricted shares for realistic edge cases like executive, legal, HR, and finance working files, but those now appear as exceptions instead of dominating the repository surface.
  • Cleaner downstream repository counts Flagship datasets such as Duckburg now present a far more believable file-share footprint for SharePoint- and Teams-heavy organizations, which improves downstream CMDB, coverage, and repository analytics.

v0.8.0​

This release focuses on realism expansion beyond the flagship Duckburg bundle, with particular emphasis on topology completeness, CMDB quality, and more believable access/resource surfaces.

Highlights​

  • AD sites and subnet realism Generated environments now include Active Directory sites, site links, site memberships, internal network subnets, and realistic IP allocation for workstations, servers, telephony, and network assets.
  • Stronger CMDB operating shape Configuration items now carry a more believable criticality spread across platform, application, infrastructure, collaboration, software, and data surfaces, reducing the flat analytical profile that broke downstream realism.
  • Cleaner resource and access realism Shared resources and major enterprise applications now tell a clearer group-centric access story, with fewer synthetic naming artifacts in repositories, collaboration workspaces, and supporting ACL surfaces.
  • Duckburg refresh The DTED demo package was regenerated again from the improved source contract so topology, CMDB, repository, and plugin-record realism all start from the newer baseline.

v0.7.0​

This release focuses on realism hardening in the flagship Duckburg dataset, especially around identity, access, endpoint coverage, and release-quality naming.

Highlights​

  • Group-centric access realism Major enterprise applications, shared mailboxes, and file-share resources now surface clearer governing groups instead of leaning on direct assignment patterns or synthetic-looking ACL labels.
  • Identity and endpoint cleanup Device-account display names, sAMAccountName uniqueness, account OU repair behavior, and endpoint/security agent coverage are all tighter and more believable across hybrid and cloud-facing identity surfaces.
  • Stronger organization/output polish Team and resource naming was refined further, late-stage synthetic suffix artifacts were removed, and Duckburg now reads more like an enterprise environment and less like a procedurally stitched demo bundle.
  • Broader realism validation The quality sweep now catches more release-stage issues earlier, including duplicate directory account names, weak access-label patterns, and OU-reference cleanup noise.

v0.6.0​

This release focuses on realism hardening and stronger downstream export evidence, especially for DTED-oriented validation and demo datasets.

Highlights​

  • Organization and reporting realism Large scenarios now generate cleaner department and team structures, more believable reporting lines, and tighter person-to-team alignment instead of fragmented manager spray or breadcrumb team names.
  • Richer DTED-facing evidence Normalized exports now carry stronger policy-setting provenance and CMDB evidence, including typed source and behavior on policy settings plus fqdn, unc_path, rto_hours, and rpo_hours on configuration items.
  • Identity and access alignment Account evidence remains consumer-agnostic, but the generated data is now better shaped for downstream bridges that need lifecycle, state, and non-AD identity-store association cues.
  • Duckburg refresh The flagship Duckburg package was regenerated with the newer realism, CMDB, policy, organizational, and plugin-record surfaces so downstream testing starts from a cleaner baseline.

v0.5.1​

This patch release focuses on docs toolchain security hygiene.

Highlights​

  • Patched website transitive dependency The docs stack no longer pulls the vulnerable uuid path through sockjs; the site now uses a vendored sockjs patch backed by Node's built-in crypto.randomUUID().
  • Clean audit surface The website lockfile was refreshed so npm audit is clean again without waiting on an upstream Docusaurus or webpack-dev-server release.
  • Verified docs runtime Both the static site build and the local Docusaurus development server were validated against the patched dependency tree.

v0.5.0​

This release focuses on source realism and evidence quality for downstream consumers such as DTED, without turning DataGen itself into a consumer-specific adapter.

Highlights​

  • Identity realism cleanup Large flagship scenarios no longer emit dense clusters of duplicate person display names, and account/device identity evidence is more coherent across people, devices, and machine accounts.
  • Stronger export evidence Normalized exports now carry richer lifecycle and classification signals, including account creation/modification timestamps, application type/deployment type, and improved policy-setting path data.
  • Identity store and application realism AD, Entra, and Okta naming/domain surfaces are cleaner and more believable, and application metadata is stronger for downstream typing and relationship construction.
  • Richer policy corpus Policy generation now produces a broader, more enterprise-like management surface with better path realism and stronger scope evidence across Group Policy, Intune, and Conditional Access.
  • Duckburg acquisition scenario The flagship Duckburg scenarios now include an acquired-company path so downstream discovery and migration tooling can exercise integration-oriented company-to-company relationships.

v0.4.4​

This patch release corrects the release-tag lineage so GitHub Actions runs the intended fixed revision.

Highlights​

  • Clean release tag The v0.4.4 tag points at the corrected release commit, so the release workflow uses the fixed flagship acceptance test and portability guardrail changes.
  • No functional regression This release carries forward the same runtime fixes from v0.4.3; the primary change is publishing them under an unambiguous release tag.

v0.4.3​

This patch release focuses on release reliability and test portability.

Highlights​

  • Portable flagship acceptance tests The flagship realism acceptance suite now uses only repo-stable example scenarios, so release builds no longer depend on local generated artifacts.
  • Hardened portability validation The repo portability validator no longer self-matches on its own detection pattern, which keeps CI and release workflows from failing on the guardrail itself.

v0.4.2​

This patch release focuses on release portability and contributor guardrails.

Highlights​

  • Repo portability validation DataGen now includes a validator that checks tracked files for machine-specific absolute paths before they break CI or release workflows.
  • Optional pre-push hook Contributors can enable a repo-managed pre-push hook to run the portability check automatically before publishing changes.
  • Stable realism review defaults The realism review script now defaults only to repo-stable scenario inputs instead of depending on local generated artifacts.

v0.4.1​

This patch release focuses on security and release automation hygiene.

Highlights​

  • Secure machine-account password generation Machine-account passwords now use cryptographically secure randomness instead of the general generator random source.
  • Explicit CI workflow permissions The CI workflow now declares explicit read-only permissions to satisfy current GitHub Actions security policy and keep release automation unblocked.

v0.4.0​

This release is the point where DataGen moved from a stronger enterprise generator into a broader synthetic operating environment platform.

Highlights​

  • Bundled domain packs DataGen now includes first-party packs for ITSM, SecOps, and BusinessOps through the native scenario packs model.
  • Temporal simulation foundations Generated worlds can now include temporal events, drift, and snapshot-oriented export artifacts.
  • Productized scenario authoring Archetypes, persona presets, richer overlays, and an archetype-first wizard now shape the preferred authoring workflow.
  • Major realism hardening Recent work improved organization structure, geography, groups, policies, repositories, CMDB artifacts, applications, infrastructure, and external ecosystem modeling.
  • Built-in quality validation Generation results now include structured quality reports, and the realism review tooling can emit both markdown and JSON for CI and repeatable review loops.

Practical impact​

For most users, this means:

  • easier scenario setup
  • more believable default output
  • better operating-domain coverage
  • stronger validation and demo datasets
  • clearer automation and CI checks around generation quality

Recommended entry points​

If you are starting fresh with the current platform, begin with:

If you are extending the platform, also read:

Notes on release scope​

DataGen continues to treat downstream import shaping as an external concern.

The work in this release deepens the generated source environment itself:

  • richer structure
  • more realistic operating domains
  • temporal behavior
  • stronger quality and realism diagnostics

It does not turn the core product into a collection of consumer-specific adapters.