With hybrid work becoming the norm and workplaces more complex than ever, technology plays an even greater role in employee productivity. According to an Omdia report, going forward, more than half the workforce is set to work in a mobile or hybrid fashion over the long term. This means that C-level IT and business executives are embracing new technology, processes, and people practices supporting and securing new work styles.
As work styles become increasingly diverse and the talent shortage in IT continues, maintaining a positive technology experience for a hybrid workforce while ensuring strong security becomes critical yet challenging for organizations.
For far too long, customers have had to rely on custom solutions to manage users' technology experience. This approach has led to increased complexity, higher costs, and greater difficulty in managing multiple agents from point solutions that may lead to poor endpoint performance.
Endpoint analytics, a built-in feature of Microsoft Intune, provides organizations, wherever they are on their journey to the cloud, meaningful metrics and insights for measuring the quality of the end-user experience. Intune Endpoint analytics has seen rapid adoption over the past year, with over 70M devices enabled currently.
Building on this success, today we're thrilled to introduce advanced capabilities of Endpoint analytics that will provide the intelligence needed to gain deeper insights into the end-user experience. IT processes are more streamlined with proactive detection and remediation of issues that impact user productivity. The result is a better user experience and a stronger security posture. Over time, these capabilities will also help address the IT talent shortage impacting customers in many markets.
At launch, these advanced capabilities include anomaly detection, custom device scopes, and enhanced device timeline. These features provide granular insights, proactive detection of issues that may be unreported, and enhanced troubleshooting capabilities that enable IT administrators to use machine learning to identify patterns and anomalies and help organizations better understand the IT environment.
Proactively detect and resolve issues
Traditionally, IT and security teams have limited visibility into problems such as unexpected PC restarts, app crashes, premature hardware issues, microphone issues, etc. Endpoint analytics is great at providing a birds-eye view of a diverse range of signals related to endpoint performance and reliability. But with the dynamic nature of our work environments, sudden changes can result in unexpected problems. Continuous monitoring of reports to pinpoint issues is simply not a scalable solution for IT and security teams.
With anomaly detection and enhanced device timeline, IT admins can proactively identify potential Windows device issues across their end-user computing landscape and troubleshoot them more effectively. This will help IT resolve issues in a timely manner before they impact the end-user experience and security. Anomaly detection, an early warning mechanism for identifying issues, is always looking for changes in device behavior or unexpected signals, providing a fast, reliable, and objective indicator of potential issues.
Anomalies with a high level of severity that impact productivity the most are surfaced alongside Model and Device scores in the Endpoint analytics report. This helps IT to quickly identify issues and take remedial action. When alerted to an anomaly, you can drill into an impacted device and, using an enhanced device timeline, see recent events on that device. This helps put issues in context and reduces troubleshooting time, enabling administrators to move from investigation to mitigation quickly.
For instance, an app regression anomaly with high-severity impact may surface, leading to a detailed view of key information, such as the app name, app version, number of affected devices, and potential factors influencing the anomaly. By selecting View of affected devices, IT admins can access a detailed list of devices with relevant key attributes and select a specific device for a deep dive into its device timeline view, surfacing events related to that specific endpoint.
This empowers IT admins and security operations teams to remediate at the device level. In future releases, Microsoft plans to integrate more AI-powered workloads in Intune, harnessing the capabilities of AI and machine learning to provide deeper insights into user cohorts and to prioritize the most critical information.
Gain deeper insights with custom device scopes
Custom device scopes offer customers the flexibility to analyze the performance and reliability of subsets of their devices using Endpoint analytics. By leveraging the Scope tags, you can easily slice and dice the Endpoint analytics reports to get more granular insights for the devices for which you're responsible. This means you can now drill down into the performance of specific business groups or geographic regions, allowing you to identify trends and issues that may not have been visible before.
With this level of insight, you can make more informed decisions and take action to improve device performance, resulting in increased productivity and efficiency for your organization. Custom device scopes provide an added layer of customization to Endpoint analytics, enabling you to tailor reports to your specific needs and use cases.
How to get started
We're always looking for ways to help simplify your everyday IT operations. In the coming months, we'll continue to build on these capabilities to help you shift from reactive to proactive and reduce repetitive manual work through automation.
To get started, enroll devices in Endpoint analytics, and begin a trial or purchase licenses for the Microsoft Intune Suite. Once you have active licenses for the Intune Suite in your tenant, advanced Endpoint analytics features will be automatically enabled. Learn more about advanced Endpoint analytics at Microsoft Learn.
Learn how Endpoint analytics is integral to the new Microsoft Intune Suite!
Read the launch announcement, check out the newest episode of Microsoft Mechanics, and take advantage of two amazing opportunities to explore Intune capabilities and use cases:
- Microsoft Secure – March 28, 2023 (digital)
Learn and share comprehensive security strategies to protect more with less. - Tech Accelerator: Microsoft Intune Suite – April 11-12, 2023 (digital)
Get a closer look at the latest features, capabilities, and scenarios with two days of technical deep dives and live Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) sessions delivered by the engineering teams building the future of Microsoft Intune.
You can also explore our Microsoft Intune Suite technical documentation.