Why Finding the Right Report in Microsoft Intune is Harder than it should be
Microsoft Intune contains a huge amount of valuable information about devices, users, applications, compliance, configuration, updates and enrollment.
The challenge is rarely a lack of data. It’s turning that data into clear answers quickly enough to take action.
Endpoint teams regularly need to answer questions like:
- Which devices haven’t checked in for more than 30 days?
- Which devices are falling behind on patches?
- Why did an application deployment fail?
- Which compliance policies are causing the most issues?
- Are Autopilot deployments improving over time?
- Which policies have drifted from their intended configuration?
These seem like straightforward operational questions. Yet answering them often means navigating multiple areas of Intune, exporting data to Excel, writing Microsoft Graph queries, building Power BI dashboards or manually combining reports.
Those approaches have their place, particularly for highly customized or cross-platform reporting. But teams shouldn’t have to build a reporting solution every time they need to answer a common operational question.
The Data Exists. The Answers Don’t Always.
Intune organizes reporting around different parts of the platform.
Device information, compliance, application deployments, Windows updates, configuration policies and Autopilot each have their own views. While this structure makes sense from a product perspective, it doesn’t always reflect how administrators troubleshoot problems.
When a user can’t access company resources, an administrator isn’t looking for a specific report. They’re trying to understand what happened.
That investigation may require checking device health, compliance status, configuration policies, application deployments, encryption, updates and last check-in time.
The information exists, but the administrator still has to find it, connect it and interpret it.
That’s where reporting becomes harder than it should be.
Start With the Question, Not the Report
When we built the Eido Report Library, we started with a simple observation:
IT teams don’t think in report names. They think in problems.
An administrator doesn’t wake up wanting to open a “Compliance Status Breakdown” report. They notice compliance has dropped and want to know why.
They see support tickets increasing and want to know whether the same users or devices are repeatedly affected.
They hear software costs are rising and want to understand which applications are actually being used.
Reporting should reflect that way of working by helping teams move from an operational question directly to the devices, users, applications or policies involved.
That’s why Eido includes 122 out-of-the-box reports across 19 categories, built around the questions Intune administrators ask every day.
Moving Beyond the Headline
High-level metrics are useful, but they rarely explain what’s actually happening.
Knowing devices are non-compliant doesn’t tell you:
- Which devices are affected
- Which policies are failing
- Whether problems are concentrated in one department
- Whether stale devices are skewing the results
- Which issues require immediate attention
Similarly, knowing devices are missing updates doesn’t explain which updates are overdue, how long they’ve been missing or whether the device has simply stopped checking in.
Reports such as Non-Compliant Devices, High SeverityCompliance Devices, Devices Behind on Patches, Outstanding Patches by KB and Stale Devices help teams move from a headline number to the underlying cause.
The goal isn’t more data, it’s faster understanding.
Looking at Problems from the User’s Perspective
Many endpoint issues begin with a user reporting that something isn’t working.
An application is missing.
Access has been blocked.
A required configuration never applied.
Investigating these issues often means jumping between multiple sections of Intune.
Eido’s user-focused reports, including Users with Patch Issues, Users with Configuration Issues, Users with App Deployment Issues and Users with Non-Compliant Devices, bring those related problems together so service desk and endpoint teams can quickly identify patterns across a user’s devices.
Visibility Into Applications, Autopilot and Policy Drift
Application deployments become increasingly difficult to troubleshoot as environments grow.
Teams need to understand which applications are failing, who is affected, whether failures are widespread and whether multiple applications are failing on the same devices.
Similarly, a completed Autopilot deployment doesn’t necessarily mean the experience was successful. It may have taken hours, required manual intervention or resulted in a poor onboarding experience.
Eido provides dedicated reports covering application deployment failures, slow and failed Autopilot deployments, ESP failures and policy drift so teams can identify problems earlier instead of discovering them after users are impacted.
Device Reporting Needs Lifecycle Context
Healthy devices aren’t always healthy investments.
A device may be compliant, fully patched and actively checking in while approaching the end of its supported lifecycle.
That’s why Eido integrates warranty information from Dell, Lenovo, and HP, allowing organizations to identify devices that are:
- Still under warranty
- Approaching warranty expiry
- Already out of warranty
- Candidates for replacement
Combining warranty status with device health provides better operational context and supports smarter lifecycle decisions.
Reporting That Fits Your Organization
Out-of-the-box reports answer common questions immediately, but every organization has different priorities.
Eido also supports custom reports and calculated columns so teams can report by department, location, business unit, device model, warranty status or virtually any combination of data.
Calculated columns can simplify technical information into business-friendly insights, such as:
- Internal device risk ratings
- Device lifecycle stages
- Devices that are both non-compliant and out of warranty
- Operational health classifications
This makes reporting easier to understand for stakeholders who don’t work inside Intune every day.
Dashboards That Show Progress
Different audiences need different levels of detail.
An endpoint engineer may need the root cause of an application failure, while an IT leader wants to know whether overall application reliability is improving.
Eido allows teams to build dashboards for both technical and executive audiences while tracking trends over time, including:
- Compliance improvements
- Patch progress
- Application reliability
- Autopilot performance
- Warranty trends
- Device health
Point-in-time reports explain what’s happening today.
Trend reporting shows whether the environment is actually improving.
Reporting Should Lead to Action
The best reports don’t simply display data.
They help teams understand:
- What happened
- Why it matters
- Where to investigate
- What to do next
That’s the philosophy behind the Eido Report Library.
Instead of building every report from scratch, endpoint teams can answer common Intune questions immediately, customize reporting around their own environment and communicate meaningful progress through dashboards and trends.
Ultimately, the most important question isn’t:
“How many reports do we have?”
It’s:
“Can our team quickly answer the operational questions that matter?”
When the answer is yes, reporting becomes more than a collection of dashboards. It becomes an essential part of operating, improving and planning the modern Intune environment.
Want to see this in your environment? Request a Demo of Eido Now.