NERDIO GUIDE
Customer story
Introduction
Cross-tenant AVD and Intune analytics is the unified monitoring and reporting of Azure Virtual Desktop performance and Microsoft Intune device health across multiple Entra ID tenants. For enterprise IT teams, this visibility is essential for managing security and user experience at scale.
Without a consolidated view, managing session host health and device compliance across business units becomes fragmented, leading to operational inefficiencies and increased security risks. Centralized analytics allow you to maintain a consistent posture while optimizing costs and performance globally.
What is the difference between single-tenant and cross-tenant analytics for AVD and Intune?
Managing a single Azure tenant is straightforward, but enterprise environments often span multiple business units, geographic regions, or subsidiaries. In these scenarios, having a "single pane of glass" isn't just a convenience—it's a requirement for governance and rapid troubleshooting.
Imagine a global organization where one division is running outdated AVD session hosts while another has misconfigured Intune policies. Without cross-tenant analytics, your IT team might spend hours manually switching between portals just to identify a common connectivity issue. Statistics show that centralized visibility can reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) by up to 30% in multi-tenant environments by surfacing global trends that remain invisible in isolated views.
Why do enterprise IT teams need a cross-tenant view of their environment?
- Unified Governance: Enforce consistent security baselines across every subsidiary or department.
- Operational Efficiency: Monitor global AVD performance metrics, such as Round Trip Time (RTT) and connection success rates, from one dashboard.
- Resource Optimization: Identify underutilized AVD host pools across tenants to consolidate licenses and reduce Azure spend.
Does native Microsoft Intune reporting provide a unified multi-tenant view?
- Native Intune reporting is primarily designed for a single-tenant context. While Azure Lighthouse can project resources, many administrators find the data fragmentation between the Intune portal and Azure Monitor a significant hurdle.
- Native tools often require extensive manual KQL (Kusto Query Language) work to aggregate logs from disparate workspaces into a single reporting engine like Power BI.
How does Intune compliance status compare to full-spectrum endpoint visibility?
When evaluating endpoint health, many organizations rely solely on Microsoft Intune’s "Compliance Status." However, compliance is a binary indicator: a device either meets your specific policy rules or it doesn't. While useful, this metric often obscures the deeper technical realities of your environment.
Relying only on compliance is like checking if a car is "legal to drive" (it has brakes and lights) without checking its fuel level, engine health, or tire pressure. A device can be "Compliant" in Intune while still missing critical application updates or having a drifted configuration that impacts user productivity. To bridge this gap, enterprises are moving toward a 4-pillar visibility model that offers a more granular view of both virtual (AVD) and physical endpoints.
Why is compliance status alone insufficient for enterprise endpoint management?
- Binary Limitations: A "Compliant" device may still have broken configurations or "ghost" applications that haven't successfully reported their status.
- The Visibility Gap: Intune traditionally focuses on one pillar (Compliance), whereas complex enterprise environments require data on three additional fronts: Configuration, Applications, and Patching.
How does Nerdio expand visibility beyond the single pillar of Intune compliance?
- Nerdio bridges the gap by providing a factual "1 vs 4" comparison. While Intune reports on Compliance Status, Nerdio expands this to include Config Status, App Status, and Patch Status.
- This comprehensive view applies across all endpoints—ensuring that your physical laptops and your AVD session hosts are held to the same rigorous performance and security standards.
To help you visualize the limitations of traditional reporting, the following table compares native Intune monitoring against the broader visibility model required for cross-tenant enterprise environments. In the following section, we will describe the 4 pillars of comprehensive cross-tenant endpoint analytics—Compliance, Configuration, Application, and Patch status—and how they work together to ensure true operational excellence.
| Visibility Pillar | Native Microsoft Intune Focus | Comprehensive Analytics (Nerdio Model) | Operational Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compliance Status | ✅ | ✅ | Confirms if devices meet basic security rules. |
| Configuration Status | ❌ | ✅ | Detects "drift" from established global baselines. |
| Application Status | ❌ | ✅ | Verifies software installation health across all tenants. |
| Patch Status | ❌ | ✅ | Tracks WUfB deployment and vulnerability gaps in real-time. |
What are the four pillars of comprehensive cross-tenant endpoint analytics?
To achieve true operational excellence, your analytics must move beyond simple "green checkmarks." You need to understand exactly where a device stands in its lifecycle and how its configuration deviates from your global standards.
By tracking these four specific pillars across every tenant, you can proactively identify issues before they trigger a support ticket. For example, knowing that a specific application failed to update on 15% of your AVD hosts across three different tenants allows you to fix the root cause—the installer—rather than chasing individual "non-compliant" alerts.
The 4-Pillar Visibility Framework
| Focus Area | Why it Matters | |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance Status | Security Policies | Ensures devices meet encryption, OS version, and MFA requirements. |
| Configuration Status | Desired State | Detects "configuration drift" where settings have changed since original deployment. |
| Application Status | Software Health | Verifies that critical line-of-business apps are installed and functioning correctly. |
| Patch Status | Vulnerability Management | Tracks the deployment of security updates (WUfB) across all virtual and physical devices. |
How do you track configuration status across multiple tenants?
- Monitor "Solution Baselines" to ensure all session hosts in every tenant have the same optimized registry keys and performance tweaks.
- Identify when local admin changes have overridden corporate Intune policies.
What is the best way to monitor cross-tenant app status and deployment success?
- Aggregate application reliability data to see which app versions are causing crashes in specific AVD host pools.
- Use unified management to push one update to all tenants and monitor the success rate globally.
How can you manage and report on patch status in a multi-tenant environment?
Centralize Windows Update for Business (WUfB) reports to identify which tenants are vulnerable to zero-day exploits.
How do you implement cross-tenant AVD and Intune monitoring technically?
Setting up cross-tenant analytics requires a robust data architecture, typically following a "hub-and-spoke" model. This involves directing logs from multiple "spoke" tenants into a single "hub" Log Analytics Workspace (LAW) where the data can be queried and visualized.
To visualize this architecture, consider the flow of telemetry from disparate business units into a single point of truth. The following diagram illustrates how virtual and physical endpoint data from multiple Entra ID tenants are aggregated through a unified management plane into a centralized workspace.
- Source Tenants (A, B, & C): Represents the individual Entra ID directories for various business units or customers, each containing a mix of AVD session hosts and physical Intune-managed devices.
- Dual-Stream Telemetry: Highlighting that both virtual (cloud) and physical (laptop) data are captured at the source to prevent visibility silos.
- The Aggregation Hub: All telemetry is routed to a Centralized Log Analytics Workspace, which acts as the data repository for cross-tenant querying.
- The Unified Management Plane: An overlay layer that standardizes authentication, simplifies KQL querying, and provides the administrative interface to act on the data globally.
To do this successfully, you must navigate the complexities of Entra ID permissions and data residency. Many organizations leverage Azure Monitor Workbooks to create interactive reports that can toggle between different subscriptions and tenants. However, the manual effort to maintain these queries as your environment scales can be significant.
To help you navigate the technical transition from fragmented native reporting to a consolidated model, the following table contrasts the manual architectural requirements of native tools with the automated, multi-tenant framework provided by Nerdio.
| Manual Hub-and-Spoke (Native) | Nerdio Management Layer | |
|---|---|---|
| Tenant Connection | Manual Log Analytics Workspace peering. | Automated cross-tenant "Identity Fabric" linking. |
| Query Logic | Custom KQL union operators required for every report. | Pre-built, multi-tenant dashboards out of the box. |
| Authentication | Manual B2B guest account or Lighthouse delegation. | Standardized trust settings and service principal automation. |
| Remediation | Per-tenant manual script execution. | Global Scripted Actions pushed to all tenants at once. |
What are the prerequisites for aggregating logs across multiple Entra ID tenants?
- Diagnostic Settings: Every AVD host pool and Intune-managed device must be configured to send telemetry to a LAW.
- Identity Fabric: Use Azure Lighthouse to delegate access, allowing admins in the managing tenant to query data in the customer or business unit tenants without constant context-switching.
- Authentication: Within your identity governance framework, cross-tenant access settings in Microsoft Entra ID must be configured to trust the multi-factor authentication (MFA) and device compliance claims from home tenants to ensure secure, streamlined access to shared monitoring data. Establishing inbound trust settings within Microsoft Entra ID ensures that external monitoring accounts can satisfy security requirements using home-tenant credentials, removing the need for redundant multi-factor authentication prompts during the data aggregation process.
Can you use Power BI and Kusto (KQL) for cross-tenant AVD and Intune dashboards?
- You can use the union operator in KQL to merge data from multiple workspace IDs into a single result set.
- Power BI can then ingest this data to provide high-level executive summaries of global health and cost.
How does Nerdio simplify cross-tenant AVD and Intune management and analytics?
Nerdio provides a unified management layer that eliminates the friction of managing disparate tenants. By integrating deeply with both AVD and Intune, it automates the collection of telemetry and presents it through an intuitive interface designed for technical and business professionals alike.
Nerdio Manager for Enterprise is specifically built to handle the complexities of multi-tenant environments. It doesn't just show you that a problem exists; it provides the tools to remediate it across your entire estate with a few clicks. For instance, if your analytics surface a patching gap (the 4th pillar), you can use Nerdio's "Scripted Actions" to force an update across all session hosts, regardless of which tenant they reside in.
How does Nerdio provide a "single pane of glass" for all physical and virtual endpoints?
- Nerdio centralizes management for AVD, Windows 365, and physical Intune-managed devices. This allows IT teams to manage the entire user experience from one console.
- It effectively bridges the reporting silos that often exist between cloud desktop teams and endpoint management teams.
How does Nerdio automate the reporting of the four critical status pillars?
- Automated Dashboards: Nerdio generates real-time reports for Compliance, Config, App, and Patch Status out of the box.
- Drift Detection: It automatically flags when a tenant’s configuration drifts from the established global baseline.
What are the benefits of Nerdio’s cross-tenant policy and script management?
- Global Assets: Create a policy or application package once and deploy it across dozens of tenants simultaneously.
- Quantifiable ROI: By automating these multi-tenant tasks, organizations often see a 75% reduction in management overhead, allowing IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual maintenance.
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