One of the most common requests that we hear from our Endpoint Manager reporting solutions BI for SCCM and BI for Intune customers is that they would like to have the ability to track the progression of deployments. This can be any type of deployment such as a new application or Windows Updates. This is not a new request, I’ve heard similar requests from management for the 20 or so years that I have been working with ConfigMgr and Intune. Sadly, the answer has always been the same, “This is just not something that the product(s) were built to do”. I can tell you how many devices have something installed today, but seeing the progression of the installs has historically not been something that we could provide.
This is just not something that ConfigMgr was built to do.
Well, we couldn’t easily do it until now… With the introduction of scorecards and the general availability of metrics in Power BI now you can leverage BI for SCCM and/or BI for Intune to track the progression of any deployment type. In a nutshell the scorecard takes a snap-shot of the data that you want to track at intervals you define. To quote the Microsoft documentation, “Metrics in Power BI let customers curate their metrics and track them against key business objectives, in a single pane.” These capabilities open a new world of possibilities in terms of producing, and taking action upon, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that have tremendous business value. We can even automate actions based upon the data in the scorecard using Power Automate. For example, you might want to send out notifications if your updates compliance does not reach a particular milestone. Or, you might want to pause the next update ring. Again, the possibilities are endless.
It is not my intention to describe a one-size fits all solution in this blog. This blog intends to provide information about these new Power BI features and to plant a seed that you can grow into solutions that fit your organization’s unique needs.
Prerequisites:
- Power BI Pro license.
- Admin, Member, or Contributor role in a workspace.
- Build permission for the dataset.
- Basic knowledge of creating reports in Power BI.
- A paid or trial subscription to BI for SCCM or BI for Intune.
Create a scorecard
- Sign-in to Power BI (app.powerbi.com)
- Select Metrics in the navigation pane.
- Select New scorecard.
- Name your scorecard, provide a description, and select the BI for SCCM or BI for Intune workspace.
- Select Create.
Create Metrics
First you need a source to define your metrics. The metrics that you select can be anything that you want to measure. In this example I will use a simple page that I created in BI for Intune to count the number of devices on given versions of Windows 10. Once I have setup my metrics I come back and set the page as hidden since it’s not page that I want anyone to interact with directly. It’s purpose is simply to provide the data used for the scorecard metrics. I will use the count of devices on the June 2022 Windows 10 cumulative update as the current value and the total number of devices as the target value in the scorecard.
- Name your metric, provide the start and dues dates.
- Select Connect to data in the Current field.
- Select the report that has the data you want to track.
- Select Next
- Select the report page that contains the data that you would like to track.
- Select the visual that contains the data that contains the item that you would like to track. In this example I have select a visual that shows the number of devices currently on the June 2022 Windows 10 cumulative update.
- Select Connect to data in the Final target field.
- Select the report page that contains the data that you would like to track.
- Select the visual that contains the data that contains the item that you would like to track. In this example I have select a visual that shows the total number of Windows 10 devices.
- Select Save.
- You might consider automating the status of the item being tracked, for example if you have reached a given percentage of compliant devices within a given number of days you might set the status to “At Risk”. You might also consider setting submetrics. For example, you might want to track each of your update rings individually.
- Select the metric that you’ve just created.
- On the Settings tab select the Frequency that you’d like to track the change.
- Select Track.
- You have complete the steps to create a basic scorecard.
As the data in the report changes the changes are tracked by the scorecard. Once you have collected some data you can view the progression in the scorecard details.
- You might chose to add your scorecard to a page in a report to make it easier to access.
- You might chose to create a flow to take actions based upon the data in the scorecard.
