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Start monitoring Delivery Optimization usage and performance across your organization today! Following the Windows Update for Business reports announcement back in November 2022, we are excited to announce the general availability of the Delivery Optimization Windows Update for Business report.
We genuinely appreciate those of you who participated in the public preview! You helped us verify the accuracy of the new data tables and revise the layout. Your responses helped us identify and address all critical issues, so it can now be offered to all Delivery Optimization users. In this article, find guidance to:
- Get started with Windows Update for Business reports
- Customize your Delivery Optimization report
Get started with Windows Update for Business reports
If you’re an existing Update Compliance user, you’re probably aware of the Update Compliance migration to Windows Update for Business reports. The new report experience provides templates for Windows reporting for monitoring organization and device level data with the added flexibility to customize a given report.
The Delivery Optimization Window Update for Business report provides a familiar experience, surfacing important data points that supply a unified way to check the performance across your organization. It contains data for the last 28 days, and we’ve added the long-awaited Microsoft Connected Cache data. In addition, we’ve reorganized the information to be more easily discoverable, leveraging the key cards that provide a quick and easy view of Delivery Optimization usage and performance.
You can quickly find the key pieces of data at the top of the report. We’ve bubbled up the metrics you care most about. You’ll find total bandwidth savings for both Delivery Optimization technologies, including peer-to-peer (P2P) and Connected Cache.
Further down the report, there are now three tabs that distinguish between Device configuration, Configuration details, and Efficiency by group.
Within Device configuration, you’ll see the breakdown of Download Mode configuration for your devices. Each configuration number in parentheses references the Download Mode set on the device.
In Content distribution, you can explore the breakdown of how bytes are delivered, from CDN/HTTP source, peers, or Connected Cache. You can also visualize the delivery method based on the different content types. By clicking on a particular content type, further drill down to richer content type details.
See an example of a particular environment that does not have an Connected Cache cache server, displaying 0% of bytes.
The last tab presents a new option. Most of your organizations use policies to create peering groups to manage devices. In the Efficiency by group section, you can toggle among four different options. After talking with many of you, we’ve generally seen that device groups for Delivery Optimization are managed in four common ways by:
- GroupID
- City
- Country
- ISP
We’ve added each of these as a quick and easy tab, so you can view the top 10 groups by number of devices. So, for example, if you’re looking at the GroupID, you’ll see the 10 top group IDs with the highest number of devices. Similarly, in the City or Country view, you’ll see the top 10 cities or countries with the greatest number of devices. Or perhaps you’re more interested in monitoring the top ISPs delivering content based on the number of devices within the organization – for that, we’ve included the ISP option.
As mentioned above, this is just the start of a new offering that enables you to tailor your report to meet the requirements of your organization. We will continue to incorporate richer features and enhanced experience in the Delivery Optimization report based on your feedback.
Customize your Delivery Optimization report
Much of the excitement with this new report format is centered on flexibility. It’s easy to modify the report template to meet your needs or if you want to run queries to further investigate your data. To do this, you can use the Windows Updates for Business reports data schema where you can access the new Delivery Optimization-related schema tables:
See what these tables look like within the LogManagement section.
We recommend running a query on each table to learn of the available fields. Let’s take a brief look at each.
UCClient table
The UCClient table is used within the Delivery Optimization report to get OSBuild, OSBuildNumber, OSRevisionNumber, and OSFeatureStatus. The data from UCClient is joined with UCDOStatus to complete the Device configuration breakdown table. You’ll notice that in Edit mode, you can easily modify the query that builds this visualization. If any changes are needed, you can modify this query accordingly.
UCDOStatus table
One of the two tables that hold Delivery Optimization-only data is UCDOStatus. This table provides aggregated data on Delivery Optimization bandwidth utilization. Explore the data for a single device or by content type. For example, the ‘Peering Status’ pie chart is powered by the UCDOStatus table.
UCDOAggregatedStatus table
The second Delivery Optimization-only data table is UCDOAggregatedStatus. The role of this table is twofold:
- Provide aggregates of all individual UCDOStatus records across the tenant.
- Summarize bandwidth savings across all devices enrolled with Delivery Optimization.
One way this table is used is to build the volume by content types. Similarly, this view can be easily changed either through the query or built-in UX controls available via Log Analytics.
Keep in touch
We hope you are as excited as we are about these new changes for Delivery Optimization reporting. There are many more things we plan to add in the future. If you have any feedback or feature requests, we’d love to hear from you! Please submit it using the Feedback link within the Azure portal.
Continue the conversation. Find best practices. Bookmark the Windows Tech Community and follow us @MSWindowsITPro on Twitter. Looking for support? Visit Windows on Microsoft Q&A.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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