App Readiness in Desktop Analytics

[Matt_Z]

I am working with a client who just migrated from Upgrade Readiness to Desktop Analytics, my focus right now is on Application Readiness and I have a few questions:

1. App Readiness: Filters instead of the query box
   • Any chance the query box from Upgrade Readiness will make a return?
   • Once you learn how to use the queries, they are amazing!
   • Having that replaced with Excel-like filters has slowed us down.
   • Using the queries to fine tune what columns are returned/shown was a huge help as well in Upgrade Readiness.
2. App Readiness:Manage plan assets - Apps interface
   • Any plans to reduce the open space at the top of the "Manage Plan Assets" screen when working with apps?
   • From a usability perspective, it would be great to be able to minimize that top portion.
   • The summary it shows is helpful and appreciated, I do not want to see it go away... I just want the task at hand (setting Importance, App Owner, and Upgrade Decision) to occupy my screen.
3. App Readiness: Filtering and "Select All"
   • When filtering on an app with 100 occurrences (version control is a work in progress) and using "Select All", it only selects the 15 items shown on the page, not ALL occurrences in the remaining 6 pages.
   • You have to click through each page, select all, and make your edits.
4. App Readiness: Exporting & PowerBI
   • Not being able to export to Excel or connect to PowerBI makes it difficult to share information with clients when needed, not everyone will have access to Desktop Analytics.
   • Sometimes we need to send a list to certain decision makers and focus on a specific vendor or application title we need them to make a decision on.
5. Deployment plans: 
   • Maybe I missed an option somewhere, but I am only seeing the option for 1 pilot and 1 production deployment.
   • Any chance we can create more than 1 of each or "deployment waves"?

I have to say, I really like the layout and presentation of Desktop Analytics. It is easier to find certain pieces of information and the summary views are useful.

I have read the documentation and am aware that some of the items in my list are either being retired or returned (source), any insight on the questions above that you can share here would be appreciated.

[#2]

Update on #3 Select All: I noticed that you can select all items and edit at once, but you need to click through each page and click select all. As you do that, the counter on the right side of the screen will increase. Lots of scrolling if you have a small screen (Surface Laptop 2).

Is anyone from the DA team able to comment on the other items or the select all behavior?

[#3]

Update on #4 PowerBI: The client granted us access to the Log Analyzer where we were able to make the connection we needed.

I did stumble across an odd item though. The client has applications with special characters in both the app name and vendor name, but you can't filter using those characters. An example is AT&T and another vendor who decided to use a tilde (~) in both fields. Any chance of being able to filter on those to match the data set?

[#4]

A little more on the query window and why the team I work on miss it so much...

The other day we had to make about 200 updates for varying applications and versions. It took me about an hour to go through 40 of these entries and then I had to pass it off to a teammate as I got pulled away. In UR with the query window I would have fired up a query generator 2 of my teammates created, fed it a CSV of these apps, generated the query, and had them updated in a matter of minutes.

The query window for editing applications was incredibly powerful. If there is any chance that it returns as a option, DA would be much more powerful and flexible. 

There is a lot to like in DA after using it for the last month and you can see from this thread that we have adjusted to some of the changes, being able to kick off your own refresh to update PowerBI for customer facing materials is huge for us! However, there are a few things that really need a conversation and consideration (query box, "white" space). I know that some of my teammates and leaders will make ourselves available for a conversation.

[#5]

Update on #1 App Readiness: Filters

Filtering on version # does not contain a greater/less than option, the filters appear to be for text fields only. With this field largely being numerical, can the filter options be adjust to account for that?

[#6]

How did you get this working with PowerBI?

[#7]

@DirectX How did I get data from Desktop Analytics in to PowerBI? If that is what you mean, I use queries from Log Analytics and the export function from there to load to PowerBI. They save as a text file and have instructions to load in to PowerBI.

Example:

Run this in Reports --> Log Analytics

MAApplicationReadiness
| project AppVendor,AppName,AppVersion,AppLanguage,Importance,UpgradeDecision,TotalInstalls,TestOwner,Remediation

Click Export --> Export to Power BI (M query)

Save the text file, open, and the directions will guide you to getting it in to PowerBI

If you encounter errors, make sure you have permissions to access the resources and you may need a PowerBI license.

[#8]

Hi,  I am working enabling Desktop Analytics.

Currently, we have Applications like App-V applications, LOB Apps (O365 Apps, Adobe), In-house core Business apps and more. 

Need to know what are all the types of applications - Desktop Analytics will discover and publish the data in Desktop Analytics Console in Admin Center?

Whether App-V application will get discovered in Desktop Analytics? Please suggest, if not, How we can report those App-V apps in Desktop Analytics?

Thanks & Regards,

Balasubramanian Murugesan 

[#9]

@Balasubramanian Murugesan 

Desktop Analytics will let you know if an App is virtualized or not. 

You can find that information in 2 ways: 

1. From the portal itself when you list the apps under 'Assets' or 'Plan Assets'.  Select an App and click on Edit to get the details about the App (see attached screenshot)

2. From the Microsoft365Analytics table in the Logs of the Azure Workspace where the data is stored. 

The following KQL query will list the Apps that are virtualized:

MAApplication

| where IsVirtualized == "true"

| distinct IsVirtualized, AppName, AppVendor

Attached is an example of the result from the query. 

Hope this helps...