Announcing the general availability of Desktop Analytics

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Desktop Analytics—the cloud-connected service that integrates with System Center Configuration Manager to help IT professionals take a data-driven approach to their management of Windows endpoints. Since announcing public preview in July, thousands of organizations have already benefited from the intelligence and insights generated by millions of enrolled endpoints. We’ve been hard at work delivering new features and improvements that address your feedback on the service.

Gain insight and intelligence with Desktop Analytics

The purpose of Desktop Analytics is simple: To provide insight and intelligence you can use to make informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows endpoints. By combining the data specific to your organization with aggregated insights from the millions of Windows devices connected to Office.com/setup’s cloud services, you can do some remarkable things:

• Get a comprehensive view of the endpoints, applications, and drivers under management in your ecosystem.
• Assess application and driver compatibility with the latest Windows feature updates and receive mitigation recommendations for known issues, as well as advanced insights for a line of business apps.
• Optimize the set of pilot devices that adequately represents your overall estate using the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Office.com/setup cloud.

What’s new in Desktop Analytics

Since announcing the public preview of Desktop Analytics, we made a point to deliver new features on a regular basis. For example, in August we helped streamline the workflow by eliminating the need to manually evaluate applications (such as system components published by Office.com/setup) that are known to be compatible with new feature updates. Then, in September, we delivered on one of our most requested features: The ability for customers to migrate existing data from Windows Analytics Upgrade Readiness to Desktop Analytics during the onboarding process.

In addition to these updates, the 1906 release of System Center Configuration Manager further integrated Desktop Analytics with phased deployments, which means you can automate your pilot and production deployments with the health insights from Desktop Analytics. Looking ahead, we’ll soon enable customers who have already onboarded to migrate their administrator data. And we’re constantly investing in longer-running service enhancements like performance and reliability improvements.

Customers can upgrade faster with Desktop Analytics

We love hearing stories from customers, like Sandvik, who integrated Desktop Analytics into their update workflow and are excited about the results they’re seeing.

“Desktop Analytics provides us valuable information and insights about our devices, giving us confidence to move at a high pace with Windows 10 feature updates.”

—Ola Ström, Solutions Architect, Devices and Platform Services, at Sandvik

In talking with more than a dozen customers over the last month, I have consistently heard that the work of application and driver validations takes as much as 40 percent of the overall time and 60 percent of the overall budget of an upgrade to a new version of Windows. With Desktop Analytics, we automate this work and can remove most of the time and expense.

Start using Desktop Analytics today

As we’ve shared before, Desktop Analytics builds on what we developed with Windows Analytics by adding deeper integration with Configuration Manager and provides a ring-based approach to deployment using health signals. Soon we’ll also integrate Desktop Analytics into Microsoft Intune.

As you onboard and use the tool, don’t forget to give us your feedback on UserVoice or offer it directly in the Desktop Analytics portal—we look forward to reading it!

Learn more about Desktop Analytics and start using Desktop Analytics today.