If you're planning a Windows 10 upgrade in your company,
today we will take a look at the newly-announced Windows Upgrade Analytics Service from Microsoft
A free service that uses client telemetry to discover,
rationalize, and evaluate applications and drivers within your current environment.
It presents key insights to streamline and accelerate your Windows upgrades
If you're familiar with previous Windows deployments
we've traditionally offered tools to help with App Compat analysis.
With the new Windows upgrade analytics, we give you powerful upgrade readiness insights
and recommendations about the computers, applications, and drivers deployed in your organization
This new service guides you through the upgrade project
using a workflow based on Microsoft recommended practices.
To get started, you have to do a few things.
You go to the Operations Management Suite homepage
to sign up for Windows Upgrade Analytics.
You can sign in using your Microsoft account or Azure AD credentials.
You don't need anything else like a credit card to login into the free OMS subscription.
So in this case, I'm already signed in.
This is the page that you land on.
It's a little empty because i haven't added any solutions yet.
This is the first run experience.
The next step is to add the upgrade analytic solution from the solutions gallery.
You basically pick the upgrade analytic solution
and you click on the Add button.
That adds the solution to your workspace.
At this point you can navigate to the settings page
and the Connected Sources tab to grab your commercial ID.
You'll need this later when you configure your PCs.
In our case we're not using the OMS agents
but, you will use agents found in the Windows update.
You can find these agents that you need at the link below
as well as more details on how to configure your PCs.
Note the KB numbers.
One tip, make sure you have the right endpoint proxy settings listed here
to allow the client data to flow.
After the agent is loaded, your PC will need to restart
for the telemetry to start to flow.
Once you complete the prerequisites
it will take roughly 48 hours for the data to show up in the upgrade analytic solution.
The first step is a quick overview blade
that shows the number of computers in your environment,
the upgraded computers,
and the number of apps deployed.
One of the first things many of you will do with the new release of Windows
is to pilot the build on a few machines.
On this next blade, we help you identify your target pilot machines.
These are computers which do not have any app or driver issues
that are known to Microsoft.
The next blade focuses on the apps and how to rationalize them.
We have taken a risk-based approach to segmenting the app populations.
We identify the apps that are deployed on less than 2% of the machines
and designate them ready to upgrade.
This list is available to you to review
and you can interact with the data to prioritize the apps that are important to you.
You can annotate which apps are business-critical
or important, are the ones you would like to ignore
in order to focus your App Compat testing efforts.
We also provide you with a view of usage of your apps
over the past month to help you prioritize.
Now let's go back to the next step of the workflow
where we focus on reviewing known app and driver issues,
and collecting the test results from your app compat testing.
For Microsoft known issues
we provide guidance around whether a fix is available.
In many cases, we worked with software vendors
to remove incompatible apps
and hardware vendors to block incompatible drivers
that may cause upgrades to roll back using the data containing sysmain.sbd.
The next step when we go back to the workflow
is to review applications with no known issues
and to input your compatibility test results.
Here, I'm going to pick the business critical apps that you had annotated earlier.
You can select the apps that you want
and then pick Ready to upgrade, or Won't upgrade, or Review in progress.
Please note, that this is a daily bad job
and updates will be reflected the next day.
Next, you can review your known driver issues and take appropriate action.
Please remember to check for the latest drivers on OEM support sites, or on the Windows update.
Now to conclude, in the last step of the workflow
you can export the list of Ready to Upgrade computers
and import it into your deployment management tool.
If you're using config manager, we include the SCCM client ID
which will make it easier for you to match this data with the SCCM data.
As you move more and more applications and drivers into the ready to upgrade category
you should see more and more computers move to the ready-to-upgrade state.
So that was an overview of the free Windows Upgrade Analytics Service.
There's more to come in the next few months.
From the ability to incorporate site usage data for your public websites or internet,
support status for third-party app source from Ready for Windows,
and seamless integration with Config Manager
that will make deployment ready data available in the SCCM console.
To get started, go to the link below. https://aka.ms/upgradeanalytics-signup
Thank you for watching
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics