Lab Builder lets you create, manage, and publish custom labs for your organization within the Immersive One platform. This article covers who can access Lab Builder, how to get started, privacy principles, and how to preview your labs.
Overview
Lab Builder is part of Immersive One and lets you build, manage, and publish custom labs for your organization. You don't need to be technical or an expert author — it's designed for a range of audiences.
You can use Lab Builder to build labs that cover your organization's specific threats, technologies, and security policies. Some common examples include:
- Security policies — labs that cover your organization's security policies and assess employee understanding of them.
- Application security attestation — labs that walk developers through application security fundamentals in your organization, including links to documentation.
- Application security misconfigurations — labs covering code misconfigurations for languages you use, or real examples of vulnerabilities in your applications.
- Cybersecurity tools — labs that cover internal tooling, giving your teams hands-on practice in safe environments.
- Cyber scenarios — scenarios built from incidents, pulling in logs, network captures, or other artifacts, and dropping them into practical environments.
- CTF — Capture the Flag events with custom machines for your teams.
These are a few common starting points, but the flexibility of Lab Builder means you can build what fits your organization's needs.
Roles and access
Any organization with access to labs through an Immersive Labs license — for example, Immersive Labs or Immersive AppSec — automatically has access to Lab Builder. If you can access lab content, you can access Lab Builder.
Users can access Lab Builder with the following roles:
| Role | Description |
| Organization Admin | Organization Admins can access Lab Builder by default. |
| Lab Creator | Lab Creator is a role that can be granted to users to give them access to Lab Builder for lab building. This role grants a user access to Lab Builder and Custom Collections, providing all of the permissions required to build and manage labs and create collections that contain the custom labs. |
Assigning a Lab Creator role to a user
To assign a Lab Creator role to a user:
- From the navigation bar, click Manage > Platform Settings, and then click Users.
- Click the user that you want to specify as a Lab Creator.
- Select the Settings tab.
- Select the Lab Creator (Product permissions) check box, and then click Save changes.
Accessing Lab Builder
To access Lab Builder:
- From the navigation bar, click Manage > Create Lab.
The Lab Builder dashboard appears.
Privacy and visibility
When you create or publish a lab using Lab Builder, only your organization has visibility and access to it. This principle applies regardless of the type of lab you build. While Immersive can share custom labs made by partners, that process is managed by Immersive.
If you import your own virtual machine into the builder, or use one of the Immersive-managed machines from the template library, these machines are deployed into live hacking environments with advanced toolsets.
Note: We strongly recommend that you do not add any sensitive material to these machines. Act on the premise that practical machines are non-sensitive.
You can archive labs to delete them and remove them from being visible to your organization. To do so:
- In the row for the lab you want to archive, click ... > Archive (as shown below).
The Lab details page, which appears when a user selects a lab, clearly indicates which labs are provided by Immersive and which are your organization's custom labs.
In the example below, your organization's name would be displayed if it is your own lab.
Lab Builder workflow
To use Lab Builder:
- Access Lab Builder.
- On the Lab Builder dashboard, create a new custom lab.
- To customize your lab:
- Configure lab details.
- Use the Briefing panel editor to provide users with the essential background knowledge they need before diving into hands-on tasks.
- Create tasks that learners must complete to finish a lab.
- Note: You can complete these steps in any order.
- (Optional) Preview your lab to test draft changes before updating them live to your organization.
- Publish your lab.
- Add your lab to a custom collection.
- Assign your lab to users.
You can also:
- Import practical machines from your own environment.
- Use one of the pre-configured, ready-to-use machines available in Immersive's template library.
See the Lab Builder FAQ for answers to additional questions.
Previewing labs
If you've made changes to your lab after it has been published, the Preview option lets you test draft changes before updating them live to your organization.
This option loads the lab exactly as it would appear in the platform if a user launched it from the standard lab details page, giving you the ability to review a new lab or changes to an existing lab in a live lab environment without needing to publish.
- You can preview your lab at any time by clicking the Preview button at the top right of the Lab Builder.
- You can also access the preview of a lab by clicking the Preview system while you are viewing a machine.