SCCM 1802 Management Insights – Understand your SCCM Environment

SCCM Management Insights is a new feature introduced in Configuration Manager version 1802. As the name says “Management Insights“, it provides information about the current state of your environment. The information that you see is based on analysis of data from the site database. Probably this is one of most interesting feature introduced in SCCM 1802.

So why was SCCM Management Insights features introduced ?. – Well, SCCM Management Insights help you to understand your SCCM environment in a better way. How easy would it be if SCCM tells you that you need to fix certain things. These are the things that you would have either not noticed or missed it. With SCCM 1802, management insights will be of great help. Based on the results, admins can then take action related to a particular insight.

SCCM Management Insights – Overview

To view SCCM Management insights rules, open the Configuration Manager Console. Click Administration node and click on Management Insights. You will notice around six insight groups and each group has certain rules that you can evaluate.

Each of the management insight group is packed with rules. Each of these rules re-evaluate their applicability on a weekly schedule. However you can re-evaluate a rule manually by right-clicking the rule and selecting Re-evaluate. When you re-evaluate a rule, you can always refer SMS_DataEngine.log file. This log file is located in Logs folder under configuration manager installation directory.

SCCM Management Insights Groups

To view Management Insights group name click Management Insights. The six management insight groups are as follows.

• Software Center
• Applications
• MacOS and Linux
• Simplified Management
• Collections
• Cloud Services

Let’s try running one of the rules and see how it helps us.

In the above example I am going to run the rule present in collections insight group. Right click “Empty Collections” rule and click Re-evaluate. This rule checks for device collections and lists the ones that do not include any members. In other words empty collections. Give it a few seconds while the evaluation occurs in the background. Hit refresh and right click the rule and now click More Details. Rule details window shows the results.

In the below screenshot, you can see that the rule has detected an empty collection. I hope you now understand what SCCM management insights are and how they can help you analyze your SCCM environment.

SCCM 1802 Management Insights Rules

Most of all let me list all the rules that are included in SCCM 1802 under management insights feature. In addition please note that some of the rules may get added or removed with new versions of configuration manager.

Management Insights Group Name	Rules
Software Center	Direct users to Software Center instead of Application Catalog. Use the new version of Software Center.
Applications	Applications without deployments.
Collections	Empty Collections.
MacOS and Linux	SCEP for Mac and Linux deprecation.
Simplified Management	Non-CB client versions.
Cloud Services	Assess co-management readiness. Enable devices to be hybrid Azure Active Directory joined. Configure Azure Services for use with Configuration Manager. Upgrade your clients to the latest Windows 10 version.

 

There are many rules that you can try out by yourself. Do mention in the comments section on how was your experience with SCCM management insights.