Event details
Are there any plans to build software usage/metering reports into Intune? We are currently utilising Software Metering through MECM as our end user devices are co-managed, however we are looking to go Intune managed for our EUD's and as such need an alternative.
I can see a request for it in Community Feedback from a year ago, but nothing published on the roadmap that I can find.
If not, are there any MS alternatives you can recommend? I have heard that 'Defender for Endpoint Advanced Hunting' can query execution events for apps?
Hi nlmitchell, Thank you for the comment. This is a common request for which we've gathered a lot of evidence and customer feedback over the years. It's something we continue to deeply investigate as well. On the surface, it's a relatively simple feature but it has two significant implications that we must design around or for and thus continue to investigate without prioritizing it:
- Cost: With ConfigMgr, the burden and cost of data storage is completely on the individual customer. With Intune, it's on us and while that's generally a very good thing for everyone, it does have a cost that we must manage. Moving the location of the storage from you the customer to us also adds cost in the form of data access and APIs. When the data is stored by the customer's system, accessing that data has a negligible cost. When it's stored in Azure (where Intune is hosted) that cost is no longer negligible. Combined, these costs add up quickly for a service the scale of Intune.
- Privacy: Arguably the bigger reason we haven't prioritized is privacy. User privacy has become a very important issue over the past 10+ users with governments enforcing standards and regulations as well (like the GDPR). Balancing this and ensuring we not only comply with the spirit of these regulations but the true intent that user and personal privacy are important is no easy feat particularly with data that can easily be leveraged to breach individual privacy.
We fully understand that using a service like Intune should shield you from these details fully as that's essentially what you're paying for, but we also should be open and honest about our current state and why, even though this is an important feature set to many, it hasn't been implemented.