5 Quick Tips for Better Intune Reporting

5 quick tips to improve Microsoft Intune reporting, support m365 security audit needs, and strengthen Microsoft 365 compliance.

Microsoft Intune reporting is one of those things most admins know they should get on top of, but it easily slips behind day‑to‑day firefighting. Yet if you care about microsoft 365 compliance, m365 security audits, or just proving to stakeholders that your devices are actually secure, Intune’s built‑in reports are absolutely critical.

In this quick tip guide, we’ll walk through five practical ways to get more value out of Intune reporting. We’ll keep it focused on what actually helps you monitor compliance, troubleshoot issues faster, and prepare for formal assessments like a m365 security audit or CIS benchmark microsoft 365 reviews—without drowning in data.

Tip 1: Start With Operational Reports for Fast Troubleshooting

If you’re not sure where to begin with Intune reporting, start with operational reports. These are the near real‑time, workload‑specific views that tell you whether a particular policy, app, or update deployment is succeeding or failing.

They’re the reports you’ll use daily when something is broken and a user is waiting on you to fix it.

Use policy and deployment reports as your first stop

Operational reports in Intune focus on current status and are designed to be actionable:

Device configuration profile reports – Show success, error, and conflict states for your configuration profiles (security baselines, hardening policies, etc.).
App deployment status – Surface installation successes and failures across devices and users.
Windows Update reports – Highlight which devices are in progress, failed, or blocked for feature updates.

In practice, when an end user says "my settings never applied" or "my app won’t install," these reports should be your first stop. They give you the quick view: is the issue with a specific device, policy assignment, or something broader like a misconfigured group or filter?

This matters a lot for m365 security assessment and microsoft 365 audit preparation. Auditors don’t just want to know you have policies—they want evidence those policies actually deploy and stay healthy.

Make errors truly actionable

Don’t just glance at the high‑level success percentage. Drill into the failures:

Filter by error state to see which devices consistently fail.
Check conflict results – often this hints at overlapping policies or legacy GPOs.
Export results to CSV if you need to work through a backlog systematically.

To be honest, a lot of organizations get stuck at the “we have policies” stage and never reach the “we resolve failed policies regularly” stage. The latter is what actually supports m365 security audit evidence and ongoing microsoft 365 compliance.

Tip 2: Use Compliance Reports as Your Security Source of Truth

If you want one place in Intune that ties directly into microsoft 365 compliance, it’s the device compliance reports. These reports show which devices meet your defined compliance policies—and which don’t.

Monitor the Device compliance and Trend reports

Under the device management reports, focus on:

Device compliance – Current snapshot of compliant vs non‑compliant devices.
Device compliance trend (60 days) – Shows how your compliance posture is moving over time.
Devices without compliance policy – Possibly the most underrated report, and a big red flag.

That last one is a quiet killer. Devices without any compliance policy assigned essentially sit outside your guardrails. From a cis microsoft 365 foundations or cis benchmark microsoft 365 perspective, that’s a clear gap.

For practical day‑to‑day use:

Review non‑compliant devices weekly.
Identify which compliance policy settings are most often violated (e.g., OS version, disk encryption, antivirus status).
Feed those findings into your m365 compliance checklist or internal security dashboards.

Treat “devices without compliance policy” as high risk

If you only act on one compliance report, make it Devices without compliance policy. These are the devices that can silently fail your m365 security assessment or future CIS certified Microsoft 365 ambitions.

Suggested simple workflow:

1. Run the report and export the list.
2. Identify the owners or groups for those devices.
3. Assign at least a baseline compliance policy and re‑check the report after a day or two.

This may feel a bit manual at first, but it closes a major blind spot that auditors and security teams often call out later.

Tip 3: Don’t Ignore Endpoint Analytics and Proactive Remediations

Intune’s Endpoint Analytics can look slightly intimidating at first, but it’s incredibly valuable once you understand what it surfaces. It’s not just about performance; it actually helps you quantify end‑user experience and stability, which indirectly feeds into your compliance story.

Use Endpoint Analytics scores to detect hidden problems

Endpoint Analytics gives you:

Startup performance reports – How long devices take to be usable after boot or sign‑in.
Application reliability – Apps that crash or hang frequently.
Work from anywhere – Readiness of devices for remote work scenarios.
Resource performance – CPU, memory, and disk related bottlenecks.
Remote connection reports – Insights into cloud PC and remote session reliability.

While this might sound more like user experience than security, in my experience, unstable devices are often the ones that miss patches, fail policies, or get bypassed by admins “just to make things work.” That’s an indirect hit to microsoft 365 compliance.

So, use Endpoint Analytics to:

Identify models or builds that constantly underperform.
Correlate poor startup or performance with policy failures.
Prioritize remediation on high‑risk, high‑impact device groups.

Leverage Proactive Remediations for custom inventory and fixes

Proactive Remediations (under Endpoint Analytics) are script‑based checks and fixes that run on devices. Two big wins here:

1. Custom inventory – Capture specific data not exposed by default Intune reports, send it to Log Analytics, and then build your own views.
2. Automated fixes – Detect and correct common misconfigurations before users even notice.

For example, you might:

Check if a required security setting is disabled and flip it back automatically.
Gather extra details for your automated m365 compliance assessment dashboards.

This is especially helpful when you’re trying to close gaps found by a cis benchmark microsoft 365 guide or internal security review and need proof that issues stay fixed over time.

Tip 4: Use Dashboards and Tiles for Stakeholder Communication

Raw reports are great for admins, but stakeholders—CISOs, managers, auditors—usually prefer simple visuals. Intune gives you a decent starting point with home tiles, overview pages, and custom dashboards.

Home and overview tiles for high-level health

Within the Intune portal, the Home and overview pages (Devices, Apps) provide tiles that summarize:

Errors, failures, and overall health.
Enrollment status and alerts.
App installation success/failure rates.
Connector and service health.

These tiles are not perfect, but they’re helpful for quick reviews:

Use them in weekly IT ops meetings to walk through status.
Screenshot or export relevant tiles to support microsoft 365 audit preparation documentation.

This kind of high‑level overview also helps you explain to non‑technical stakeholders that you’re actively monitoring endpoint risk, not just “setting policies and hoping.”

Create a role-focused custom dashboard

You can build custom dashboards in the Azure portal (and pin Intune views there) tailored to your role or audience. For example:

A Security dashboard: compliance summary, Defender Antivirus status, firewall reports.
An Operations dashboard: app deployment status, Windows Update feature readiness, enrollment health.

Even a simple dashboard that surfaces:

% compliant devices
% fully patched
Key antivirus and firewall metrics

…goes a long way to back up your m365 security assessment narrative and ongoing microsoft 365 compliance posture.

It doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to be consistent and understandable.

Tip 5: Plan Early for Advanced Reporting and Audit Readiness

At some point, built‑in reports won’t be enough—especially if you’re aiming for formal standards like CIS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST CSF mappings across Microsoft 365.

This is where you should start thinking about advanced reporting integrations and, ideally, some level of microsoft 365 compliance automation.

Know when to move beyond built-in Intune reports

Intune offers several advanced paths:

InTune Data Warehouse + Power BI – For richer, customizable historical and organizational reporting.
Azure Log Analytics integration – Send Intune logs to a workspace, query with KQL, and build detailed workbooks.
Workbooks – Prebuilt or custom dashboards that can combine multiple data sources.

These are fantastic when:

You need long‑term trend analysis for your m365 compliance checklist.
You’re aligning to CIS controls or other frameworks and need cross‑mapped reporting.
Auditors expect centralized, exportable, and repeatable reporting, not just portal screenshots.

The downside: this can be quite complex, especially if you’re not already comfortable with KQL, Log Analytics, and Power BI. So it’s smart to plan which use cases justify that investment.

Consider automated CIS-based assessments alongside Intune

If your security team is pushing for cis benchmark microsoft 365 alignment or you’re heading toward a CIS certified Microsoft 365 posture, pairing Intune data with a dedicated automated assessment platform can save a lot of manual effort.

Tools like ConfigCobra focus on microsoft 365 compliance automation rather than just raw Intune data. For example, ConfigCobra:

Continuously checks Microsoft 365 against the CIS Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark (129 controls).
Supports both Level 1 (essential) and Level 2 (enhanced) CIS profiles.
Schedules assessments (daily, weekly, monthly) so you always have fresh audit‑ready PDF reports.
Maps CIS controls to other standards like NIS2, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIST CSF.
Detects configuration drift and flags when your tenant drifts away from the benchmark.

In practice, this complements Intune reporting nicely:

Use Intune reports to see what is happening on devices (compliance, deployment, health).
Use an automated CIS tool to see how your tenant configuration stacks up against recognized baselines.

If you’re heading toward serious audit territory or want a more structured cis benchmark microsoft 365 guide in your environment, it’s worth looking at ConfigCobra’s CIS Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark page at https://configcobra.com/cis-benchmark to see how automated assessments can back up the Intune reporting work you’re already doing.

Intune’s reporting is much more than a collection of random dashboards. When you use it deliberately, it becomes the backbone of your microsoft 365 compliance story and a powerful ally in any m365 security audit.

To quickly recap the five tips:

1. Start with operational reports to troubleshoot deployments and policy issues fast.
2. Treat compliance reports as your security source of truth, especially the “devices without compliance policy” view.
3. Leverage Endpoint Analytics and proactive remediations to surface hidden problems and keep devices healthy.
4. Use home, overview tiles, and custom dashboards to communicate clearly with stakeholders.
5. Plan for advanced integrations and automation when you outgrow built‑in reports, especially if you’re targeting CIS or other formal frameworks.

You don’t have to implement everything at once. Even picking one or two of these tips and doing them consistently will noticeably improve your visibility and your ability to respond when auditors—or attackers—come knocking.

And if aligning with cis microsoft 365 foundations is on your roadmap, consider pairing your Intune reporting work with an automated assessment approach. A platform like ConfigCobra can continuously check your Microsoft 365 tenant against the CIS benchmark, help with automated compliance m365, and give you clean, audit‑ready evidence. You can explore how that works in detail at https://configcobra.com/cis-benchmark

Start small, make your reports slightly better each week, and over time you’ll have a reporting setup that not only keeps devices under control but also makes your next Microsoft 365 audit far less painful.